SpacePlace

[Space and Place] Toward a puke annotation tool?

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The Village Voice describes the "top 10 places to puke your guts out in new york city".

2. Housing Works Used Book Café, 126 Crosby Street: Lots of people come in off the street to this dim and roomy used bookstore's two ground- level, easy-to-locate, single-stall bathrooms. Nobody notices or cares. Plus, the nonprofit is associated with a free needle exchange, so people are shooting up in there (cleanly!) anyway. Good books and records to boot (no pun intended). Less than one block from the F train.

The next step would definetly be some location-based tagging system that will provide: - a rating system - narratives like postmortem (analysis of your "work"), best practices, big troubles - solutions

[Space and Place] Anthropologic Studies of Silicon Valley Culute

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The Silicon Valley Cultures Project is "is a long-term ethnographic study of the cultures living and working in the hi-tech communities of Silicon Valley, now entering its fourteenth year.". The website is full of various interesting pdf!

The Silicon Valley Cultures Project is the guiding theoretical framework which joins several ethnographic research projects studying diverse aspects of life in Silicon Valley. Drs. Darrah, English-Lueck, and Freeman have observed 14 Silicon Valley families for 2500 hours to understand the interactions of work, family and technology. (...) This web site is intended to make some of the findings accessible to the participating individuals, companies and institutions, as well as to the public at large.

in

Via le progrès:

Des îlônes pour découvrir la ville: Depuis mercredi soir, certains espaces de la ville sont mis en lumière par Noao. A ne rater sous aucun prétexte

Avez-vous déjà entendu parler des îlônes ? Non ? Et pourtant Les îlônes, « espaces-temps repérés et investis dans la ville » par l'ensemble Noao sont une jolie création qui mérite d'être connue du grand public. Noao, qui phonétiquement veut dire « know ? how ? » est une association créée il y a six ans par cinq Lyonnais. A l'origine, ils travaillaient dans une maison privée avec jardin, ouverte au public. Ils jouent alors les artistes jardiniers mais pensent un jour à inverser les rôles et à s'activer sur les espaces publics pour créer un lien personnel entre les citoyens et leur ville. Et ça marche ! Aujourd'hui, les membres de Noao ont pour tâche principale de mettre à jour des îlônes. Pour cela, ils imaginent une thématique et partent à la recherche de ces lieux magiques. « Une fois repéré, l'espace fait l'objet d'une recherche approfondie sur son passé, ses anecdotes, les rapports que les riverains entretiennent avec lui » nous explique Isabelle Moulin Saint Pierre, directrice artistique de Noao. Alors émerge la nature de l'îlône, imaginaire et réelle à la fois Car les îlônes relèvent pour une part de l'irréel, aussi Noao a inventé une légende à partir d'histoires de quartiers, qui « circule oralement et permet une redécouverte originale et fantastique de la ville de Lyon ». Telle est la volonté de Noao : « Ce que nous voulons, c'est permettre aux citadins d'avoir un autre rapport à l'espace qui les entoure, de redécouvrir la ville de façon ludique » confie Olivier Saint Pierre, le scénographe du groupe. Laurane Dumas

[Space and Place] Annotating Tool for Untapped People

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From the economist, about cybertracker, a tracking system for parks that can be used by rangers, park guards and even well-informed tourists could use it to record handy data as they work or play.

WHAT really goes on in Africa's remote national parks? Though satellite imaging and aerial surveys give a rough idea of changes in animal and plant life, the most detailed data still have to be collected on foot. This is all very well for those places where skilled botanists and zoologists swarm in the undergrowth, but what about everywhere else?

When Ebola fever struck Lossi sanctuary in eastern Congo two years ago, the zoologists who were studying the gorillas there noticed that 139 of their apes had disappeared, presumably killed by the disease. As an aside, they also recorded chimpanzees, antelopes, bush pigs and other species that were struck down, suggesting Ebola is more deadly than once thought. The toll elsewhere was unknown.

The useful extra data were collected only because the zoologists in question had a convenient system for doing so. They were testing the prototype of CyberTracker, an invention of Louis Liebenberg, a self-taught animal tracker who lives in Nordhoek, near Cape Town. CyberTracker is a hand-held device that lets users record what they see quickly and easily, and then plots maps showing exactly where the observations were made, using the Global Positioning Satellite navigation system.

[Space and Place] Virtual World/Real World Relationships

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Cory Ondrejka on why digital worlds and the real world need to be tightly: Ondrejka, Cory R, "Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse" . New York Law School Law Review.

Ever since science fiction awoke imaginations to the promise of real, shared virtual spaces, technology has been chasing this dream. However, despite the enormous technical advances of the last decade, the concept of a broadly appealing online world has not yet been realized. At the same time, the rise of massively multiplayer online role playing games has brought millions of players into online, persistent state worlds, where they spend tremendous amounts of time and money each year living, trading, fighting and dying. Players learn how to customize and to create within the online spaces, as well as how to extract this value back into the real world. Interestingly, this behavior exists even within worlds that don't explicitly allow user created content and in those that explicitly ban economic gains. The pervasive nature of user created content and free markets, while at odds with the desires of online game developers, demonstrates the opportunity for a different kind of online world. This Article will show how proper economic and legal decisions can be used to harness the power of player creativity to maximize the virtual world's growth in order to build an online space as rich and complex as the real world.

[Space and Place] Internet Café still

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Paper about entrepreneurs and Wireless Internet Café, in the NYT, it's difficult to make profit...

At cafes, malls and downtown business districts, there has been an explosion of Internet access points, or Wi-Fi hot spots, that let computer users log on to the Internet for free. That growth is a fundamental reason - though not the only one - that technology start-ups, investors and industry analysts who had high hopes for Wi-Fi are scrambling to find sustainable business models.

[Space and Place] Now it is time for re-territorialization

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I like what Marc expresses in Theorizing the Radical Potential of Location-Aware Mobiles.

With the development of communications technologies we have witnessed the progressive de-localization of information.- Where people once required a definitive "here" to receive information, communication advances have allowed for greater amounts of distance between the sender and the receiver, to the point where, with the Internet for example, information, in terms of access, has no real location at all (or, all locations at once). In location-aware computing however, data is associated with distinct physical locations on the geo-sphere, and accessed by mobile users based on their relative position in relation to that information.

I definitely think this re-localization/territorialization is the new trend. We spent many years to put distance and now we have to deal with both distance and territorialization.