Organized-Networks « NextNature.net

Posts Tagged ‘Organized-Networks’

Essay: Back to the Tribe

Traditionally, technology is seen as a force that diminishes our instincts and puts us at a distance of nature. Increasingly however, we realize technology can also energize and amplify our deepest human sensibilities – even some we had forgotten about. Propelling us not so much back to, but rather forward to nature.

By VAN MENSVOORT

Almost two decades ago, Brian Eno – artist, composer, inventor, thinker – gave an interview in which he stated the problem with computers was that there is not enough Africa in them [1]. “Africa is everything that something like classical music isn’t. Classical – perhaps I should say ‘orchestral’ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitch wise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes.”… “Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.” … “It uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 03/07/11 7 Comments »
Tags
- Back to the Tribe | Digital-Presence | Organized-Networks | Symbolic-Overdrive | virtual-for-real
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Desire Paths

Desire paths are unplanned paths grown by the erosion of its use. They emerge as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route. Perhaps some day, all our roads will be desire paths.

Thanks Emmie.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 15/06/11 8 Comments »
Tags
- Guided Growth | manufactured-landscapes | On-the-Road | Organized-Networks | Wild-systems
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BitFriday, the first crash for digital currency

On June 10, the digital currency Bitcoin lost 30% of its value in a few hours, dropping from US $28.92 to $20.01 per coin. Bitcoins are a largely untraceable form of money, relying on a peer-to-peer system for legitimacy, instead of a central authority like a government or Second Life’s Linden Labs. Gawker recently brought Bitcoins to mainstream attention in a report on Silk Road, a website where aspiring drug users can use the anonymous currency to purchase home delivery of any psychoactive from LSD to cocaine.

The Bitcoin Black Friday was the result of certain events that real life markets have learned to control for – a bank rush, where Bitcoin owners exchanged their Bits back to bucks en masse, and a market that stayed open despite rapid inflation over the last few weeks. Millions of dollars in Bitcoin investments were lost in the resulting crash. This fast-moving bear market goes to show that online events increasingly mimic ‘real’ events, and that the investors in digital markets could stand to crack open their history books. Virtual economies work the same as actual ones, although all money, by definition, is already virtual.

Via DailyTech. Image via Dipity.
Allison Guy
on 14/06/11 1 Comment »
Tags
- Boomeranged Metaphors | Digital-Presence | Organized-Networks | Symbolic-Overdrive | virtual-for-real
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Games become punishment: Gold farming in prison

Remember the gold farmers in China who put in eye-straining hours to earn virtual money in World of Warcraft? Gold farming has now made the leap to the country’s corrupt penal system. Along with back-breaking physical labor and manufacturing work in Chinese labour camps, some prisoners are forced to play massively multiplayer online games to accrue in-game credits. Inmates work in 12 hour shifts, and are beaten or tortured if they fall behind their quotas for the day. The virtual ‘gold’ is sold to players around the world eager to move ahead in the game. After games became jobs, it was inevitable that games would also become punishment.

Via: Guardian. Image via IgxPro.
Allison Guy
on 29/05/11 Comments »
Tags
- Boomeranged Metaphors | Officegarden | Organized-Networks | virtual-for-real
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Car Carousel

How sweet! It’s a carousel of cars. This shot was taken from Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime (1967) which can be considered Next Nature avant la lettre.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 27/05/11 1 Comment »
Tags
- manufactured-landscapes | Organized-Networks
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The Roots of Plant Intelligence

Plants behave in some oddly intelligent ways: fighting predators, maximizing food opportunities … But can we think of them as actually having a form of intelligence of their own? Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso presents intriguing evidence in his talk at TED. Obviously, next nature observers will appreciate his comparisons between the networked nature of plant roots and the internet.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 02/02/11 Comments »
Tags
- Bionics | Organized-Networks | Sentient Spaces
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The AI Revolution Is On

Steven Levy writes in Wired on the unexpected turn of the Artificial Intelligence revolution: rather than whole artificial minds, it consists of a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence.

Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence—except maybe a random number generator—had a hand in determining what went where.

But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might—by placing like products next to one another, for instance—Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.

The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. They don’t possess anything like human intelligence and certainly couldn’t pass a Turing test. But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks. Examples can be found everywhere: The Google global machine uses AI to interpret cryptic human queries. Credit card companies use it to track fraud. Netflix uses it to recommend movies to subscribers. And the financial system uses it to handle billions of trades (with only the occasional meltdown).

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Ruben Daas
on 23/01/11 1 Comment »
Tags
- Organized-Networks | Wild-systems
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Botnet Storm

No, this is not some solar system far, far away. Closer than you think, this is is a visualization of a botnet storm. For all you know this malicious virus, or one of its siblings, is controlling your computer – spamming thousands of innocent internet users on your behalf – at this moment. Feeling paranoid already? Yes, next nature can be harsh sometimes.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 02/12/10 1 Comment »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Guided Growth | Hypernature | Officegarden | Organized-Networks
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Augmented Reality Maps

Since a few years the internet in combination with mobile phone technology brought us something that we refer to as augmented reality: A digital projection that is placed over imagery of the existing environment to create a whole new world on the screen.

Earlier this year Microsoft Bing-Maps architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed how augmented reality features can be added to digital world maps. Including streaming video. This means that when you switch to the streetview mode you get to watch live video streams, at least when someone is broadcasting there at that moment. It’s also possible to see older footage that has been put in place with geographic photography techniques so ‘video time travel’ becomes an option.

As many mobile devices already support photo and video, we can anticipate digital maps to become “live” within some years. This reminds us of the ultimate sonar system from ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’. And like the sonar system from the movie we can ponder on the ethical implications of a system that records half of the world. Will it add a whole new perspective or simply turn every camera phone into a potential security camera? The Big Augmented Reality Maps Brother is watching you!
Michael Kluver
on 30/09/10 Comments »
Tags
- Digital-Presence | Image-Consumption | Organized-Networks | Suburban Utopia | Technorhetoric | Wild-systems
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<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/12451353">http://www.vimeo.com/12451353</a>
ECO Currency – Explanation Video

Earlier we have discussed the ECO currency, now here is an explanation video.

The ECO currency is an alternative currency to express environmental value. People who conduct labor in support of the environment receive ECO’s from a global fund, which is financed via a micro bank tax on global financial transactions.

The idea for the ECO currency originates from the hypothesis that an important factor in our environmental crisis is the disconnect between the economic ecology and the environmental ecology: Environmental values are easily destroyed because they go unnoticed within the economical system. The aim of the ECO currency is to make environmental value explicit in economical terms. Would the rain forest still be destroyed if we could pay people to let the trees stand?

If you want to stay up to date on the project, there is always a Facebook page.

The video was made by Marcel van Heist, Jop Japenga and Billy Schonenberg. Voice: Sean Lynch, Music: Armand Amar. Coaching by Koert van Mensvoort & Luna Maurer.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 12/09/10 3 Comments »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Economology | Organized-Networks | Wild-systems
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Here Comes the iPhone Virus

By analyzing billions of phone calls, researchers at Scandinavian telecom company Telenor, mapped how social connections between people – measured partly by how often they called each other – correlated with the spread of Apple’s iPhone after its 2007 debut.

The diagram above shows the evolution of the largest network of Telenor iPhone users over time. Each node represents one subscriber, and its color indicates the model used. In this case, red equals 2G, green means 3G, and yellow means 3GS.

Researchers learned that its owners helped spread the iPhone virus spread rapidly throughout their social network. A person with just one iPhone-carrying friend was three times more likely to own one themselves than a person whose friends had no iPhones. People with two friends who had iPhones were more than five times as likely to have sprung for the Apple device. Apparently the iPhone virus was highly contagious.

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Koert van Mensvoort
on 25/07/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Back to the Tribe | Designed-by-Evolution | Organized-Networks | Technorhetoric | Wild-systems
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Beehive Europe

Peculiar image of the week. Via Radarvirtuel, where you can see them fly in real time.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 26/05/10 2 Comments »
Tags
- Officegarden | On-the-Road | Organized-Networks | Wild-systems
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Infobesity

Could this 2.0-bird be suffering from Infobesity? Then it must be the result of excessive infocalorie consumption.

Following people and news-sources on microblogservices like Twitter, has become a new addictive nature to many people. While our brains have only just adapted to print, radio, television and the (passive) internet, things worth knowing are now being funneled into them as if they were sponges. Read more »
Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 09/01/10 4 Comments »
Tags
- Digital-Presence | Feed-Back | Organized-Networks | Symbolic-Overdrive
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<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/7395079">http://www.vimeo.com/7395079</a>
The Trillion Node Network

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, a remark made by Thomas J. Watson of IBM in 1943. But what if the number of computing devices connected to each other would reach the number of one trillion? A short animation.
Rolf Coppens
on 23/12/09 Comments »
Tags
- Calm-technology | Organized-Networks | Wild-systems
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Google Ads talk back!

‘Advertising is the cave art of the 20th century’, Marshall McLuhan said. Advertisings are mythical depictions of hunting and gathering rituals, that don’t take place on some stretched savanna, but in supermarkets and shopping malls. Through advanced profiles and content management systems ads can nowadays be targeted to select audiences.

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Hendrik-Jan Grievink
on 29/10/09 1 Comment »
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- Organized-Networks | Symbolic-Overdrive | Wild-systems
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Your grandparents Google

Although it exists for less than 20 years, online search has become such a commonplace activity it is hard to imagine life without it. For your grandparents it didn’t exist. For you it is a second nature. For your grandchildren it will be a first nature.

Via Boomerang. Related: Your grand-grand-grand parents new media, Google everything, Google 2084, Google DNA, Google tracks flue via sick searchers, Google manhole, Googling in physical space.
Koert van Mensvoort
on 28/10/09 1 Comment »
Tags
- Design-for-debate | Digital-Presence | Organized-Networks
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Computer versus bacteria

Are bacteria faster than a computer? According a group of biological engineers they are. The scientists have done a research in which they have used the well-known bacteria Escherichia coli to solve a mathematical problem.

The Hamiltonian path is the shortest route between city A to city B along several other cities and at which every city is visited only once. This sounds easy, however this has caused a lot of problems to the navigation systems. If you want to go from Amsterdam to Rome and visit some other European cities, there are millions of possible routes and the system will have to calculate all the separate routes to come to the final solution of the Hamiltonian path. Now the researchers have used bacteria to get a direct overview, in which the bacteria consider all the routes simultaneously.

In the research, they have modified the DNA of the bacteria and let them find the shortest route between three cities. Each city has its own combination of genes, which causes the bacteria to glow red of green. The possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. The bacteria that had found the best route fluoresced green and red, resulting in yellow colonies.

Problem solved! Althought this is just a small test and it will be difficult to program a complex computer this way, the researchers are convinced this a proof that demonstrates the possibilities of using bacteria to solve these kind of mathematical problems. According to the researchers their results validate synthetic biology as a valuable approach to biological engineering. Having a computer infected with a virus will not quite be the same anymore.

The study was published in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Related: Crash course on synthetic genomics, Bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol, Bacteria that turn CO2 into energy, Google tracks flue spread via sick searchers, Conversations at the doctor.
Renee
on 26/10/09 Comments »
Tags
- Designed-by-Evolution | Genetic-surprises | Organized-Networks | Physical-computing | Wetware
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No Signal

As technology evolves, people are more and more depending on it to function properly. But the nature of technology is that it needs networks, sources, software, batteries and signal. Once these conditions fail, horror scenarios unfold for those who depend…

Supercut video by fourfour.typepad.com | Related: Cellphone Minutes, the Next Currency, Crackberry Addicts, Handset gets taken to the grave.
Arnoud van den Heuvel
on 27/09/09 Comments »
Tags
- Back to the Tribe | Humane-Technology | Made-to-debate | On-the-Road | Organized-Networks | The-World-is-Flat
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