Service leaves city’s toughest neighborhoods off the map
Not for everybody: Street views highlight downtown, business districts.
Google today added Boston to its growing list of U.S. cities featuring on-the-ground, street level views of people and places.
You can eyeball Newbury Street fashionistas dining alfresco.
But Boston’s roughest neighborhoods, in Mattapan and Dorchester, are not included in Street Views. Those are the areas in which most of the city’s homocides took place in 2007.
– Mark Baard
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Service leaves city’s toughest neighborhoods off the map
Not for everybody: Street views highlight downtown, business districts.
Google today added Boston to its growing list of U.S. cities featuring on-the-ground, street level views of people and places.
You can eyeball Newbury Street fashionistas dining alfresco.
But Boston’s roughest neighborhoods, in Mattapan and Dorchester, are not included in Street Views. Those are the areas in which most of the city’s homocides took place in 2007.
– Mark Baard
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David Brooks (left) argues in his latest New York Times column that people should let cell phones, media players and personal computers do our thinking for us.
Such devices, Brooks says, tongue-in-cheek, can lighten our cognitive loads, by cultivating our media tastes for us.
Internet services such as Google can also fill the gaps in the memories of both the young and old, which have already been compromised by technology.
In the “The Outsourced Brain,” Brooks, tongue-in-cheek, describes a “romantic attachment” to his car’s Global Positioning System navigation device, which eliminates the need for him to remember directions.
Brooks is making a satirical cultural observation–that individuals are routinely tapping artificially intelligent agents and databases (such as the notoriously corrupt, and inaccurate, Wikipedia) to compensate for their memory lapses, even their lack of creativity.
So-called internet “music discovery services,” for example, suggest new songs for your library, based upon the contents of your computer hard drive. (I have written about some of these services in my Boston Globe column.)
Outsourcing our brains to the digital “external mind” could damage our original grey matter, which transhumanists clinically refer to as our “wetware,” some neuroscientists believe.
Brooks presents his piece as satire. But his advertising industry contacts clearly expect to benefit from the wetware-to-hardware migration.
Those contacts include brand managers for several mobile phone companies. Their aim: to turn consumers “brand fanatics”–people who are addicted to particular products and services. Continue reading
Hate arphids? Then you must hate babies, according to PC magazine columnist Lance Ulanoff.
Ulanoff made it clear this week to potential RFID advertisers that he is in their camp. In a short piece, he decries arfid opponents as “moaning about privacy and First Amendment implications” associated with the VeriChip subcutaneous arfid implant for humans.
Ulanoff says that America’s 4 million newborns each year should be chipped, so they can be tracked by Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. And he parrots VeriChip’s bogus argument that the chip will prevent tragic child abductions.
The truth is that hospitals are doing an excellent job preventing abductions without the use of permanent, implantable chips that have not undergone longterm testing in humans.
The American Academy of Pediatrics calls the risk of any newborn being abducted virtually nonexistent.
As a parent myself, I find it difficult to imagine another parent being a sucker for VeriChip’s “someone might steal your baby” pitch.
Ziff-Davis has a long history shilling for technology advertisers. For a time, the company was owned by the Japanese computer catalogue publisher Softbank.
And many years before that, in 1938, Ziff-Davis purchased the early science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which is credited with “inventing” flying saucers in its pages. William B. Ziff, Jr. inherited the company from his father in 1953. Many Ziff-Davis executives joked that Ziff, Jr., who abandoned his philosophical studies in Germany to run the company, “could see the future.”
I quite writing product reviews for several Ziff Davis publications a decade ago, after telling editors there that I refused to delete my criticisms of products from potential advertisers.
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The government needs more nodes: Various agencies want to seed cities with wireless networking devices (image from a DOD document).
Despite the high costs and unproven social benefits for municipal broadband, dozens of U.S. cities are ignoring laws banning anti-competitive practices and getting into the internet business.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense is planning to build robots that configure themselves into ad hoc wireless networks within urban areas.
City mayors claim they want to provide free and low-cost Wi-Fi access to the poor and attract business travelers. Defense planners say they need to have broadband capabilities in urban war zones.
But rather than closing the “digital divide” (which many academics admit is being exaggerated), or providing a redundant service to traveling salesmen, it appears that officials aim to seize control of internet communications and track individuals in urban areas.
Military and law enforcement agencies will also use the wireless networks to stage “hard PSYOP” attacks against a brain-chipped populace, according to historian and commentator Alan Watt, who specializes in secret societies and government intelligence operations.
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Providence, R.I. are among the cities partnering with private companies and the federal government to set up public broadband internet access. Providence used Homeland Security funds to construct a network for police, which may be made available to the public at a later date.
None of the cities are expected to turn a profit anytime soon. Nor are the poor likely to benefit from the projects.
Subscribers to Philly’s “Wireless Philadelphia” service, for example, will pay up to 73 percent more than the rate promised to them two years ago.
“(Philadelphia) presented dangerously inaccurate estimates and figures for the costs and revenue” for its wireless network, according to a recent analysis by students at Harvard Law School. Continue reading
Buggin’: One of the alternate reality headset designs at Holland’s AR+RFID Lab. The goal is to make the devices convenient and attractive enough to allow people to operate in both the real world and AR simultaneously.
IBM and Linden Labs (creators of the alternate reality Second Life) are developing headsets and other “wearable computing” devices to deliver humans into parallel realities, where they can control their experiences.
Linden Labs, for example, is developing a wearable speaker system that Second Lifers can use to communicate semi-privately in AR while continuing to function in the real world, at least at some basic level.
But at the moment, AR eyewear and headphones are typically bulky and expensive, and too distracting for the wearer.
Students at the AR+RFID Lab at the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands are shaping new designs for AR headsets (more below), to include cameras and projectors, and tracking devices. Continue reading
What a bummer. Googler users are ogling shots like this one, from a residential neighborhood in San Francisco.
Google says its new, ground-level street views (reportedly taken from atop dusty old vans cruising city streets) will be a boon for tourism and local businesses in major cities.
But Google’s point-by-point photos, shaped into navigable 3D panoramas for internet consumption, also cover residential neighborhoods.
The company tells AFP (clip and excerpt, below) it is only taking its photos from public property, which is splitting hairs.
Photographing people in public places is legal in the United States, the AFP story points out. But photographing non-newsworthy people in their homes and private spaces, and in embarrassing moments, crosses a line.
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This won’t hurt a bit. (At least, you won’t remember.)
An Alzheimer’s care facility in Florida will implant RFID tags into its patients, to help identify them in case they stray from “campus.”
Of course, it’s unlikely anyone who finds these test subjects wandering along the road will even think to scan them. Still, ABC News lapped it up.
Dozens of diabetics in Boston and Georgia have also been implanted with the subcutaneous RFID chips made by VeriChip.
The ABC News piece leading RFID opponent Katherine Albrecht. I have written extensively about Albrecht for Wired News and the Boston Globe.
Albrecht is an avowed Christian who believes that RFID tags (or arfids) may be a precursor to the Mark of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation. It’s an inconvenient angle for mainstream reporters, which, when the reporters quote her, invariably leave out of the story.
Personal note:
My relationship with Albrecht became strained after a Wired News editor reworded certain passages in my writeup of Spychips, a book Albrecht co-authored, and which includes quotes from me.
The Wired News editor wanted the piece to appear more skeptical of Albrecht’s book. He also tagged it as a review (under my byline), which it was never intended to be.
I regret not protesting the “review” tag at that time.
The artist observes his viewers in Second Life
Artist and Emerson College professor John Craig Freeman, in one recent Second Life piece, created portals to various alternate realities. One portal (one of the orbs in the image, above) might take you to the U.S.-Mexican border; another to the streets of Sao Paolo, Brazil. Freeman is among the first artists to explore the alternate world being created by Second Life users. He is also the first SL artist to be featured at the Boston Cyberarts Festival, taking place this week. He said his pieces are designed to make viewers more aware of how alternate realities will affect human interactions.
I rounded up images from John Craig and Cyberarts participants who are creating interactive and ubiquitous computing works. You can see those images here.
