It’s now possible to flip through the key chapters of Barcelona’s life as a city, through the The Historic Charter of Barcelona. This is a new interactive mapping project tracking the history of the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region from 150 A.D.
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This questionleads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive. We know that our memory relies on changes in how much a set of linked neurons stimulate each other; that it is reinforced somehow during sleep; and that recent and long-term memory involve different circuits of connected neurons. But there is much we still don’t know about how those neural events come together, whether there are stored representations that we use to talk about something that happened in the past, or how we can keep performing a previously learned task such as reading or riding a bicycle. […]
Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does. [Full article]
Back when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to be taken seriously by the American public, 3blue1brown’s Grant Sanderson released a video about epidemics and exponential growth. (It’s excellent — I recommend watching it if you’re still a little unclear on how things are got so out of hand so quickly in Italy and, very soon, in NYC.) In his latest video, Sanderson digs a bit deeper into simulating epidemics using a variety of scenarios.
Like, if people stay away from each other I get how that will slow the spread, but what if despite mostly staying away from each other people still occasionally go to a central location like a grocery store or a school?
Also, what if you are able to identify and isolate the cases? And if you can, what if a few slip through, say because they show no symptoms and aren’t tested?
How does travel between separate communities affect things? And what if people avoid contact with others for a while, but then they kind of get tired of it and stop?
These simulations are fascinating to watch. Many of the takeaways boil down to: early & aggressive actions have a huge effect in the number of people infected, how long an epidemic lasts, and (in the case of a disease like COVID-19 that causes fatalities) the number of deaths. This is what all the epidemiologists have been telling us — because the math, while complex when you’re dealing with many factors (as in a real-world scenario), is actually pretty straightforward and unambiguous.
The biggest takeaway? That the effective identification and isolation of cases has the largest effect on cutting down the infection rate. Testing and isolation, done as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Note: Please keep in mind that these are simulations to help us better understand how epidemics work in general — it’s not about how the COVID-19 pandemic is proceeding or will proceed in the future.
People on Spring Break in Florida for the past couple of weeks were famously unconcerned with social distancing measures implementing in other areas of the country to help stem the tide of COVID-19 infections and save lives. Using cellphone location data from just the phones of the people gathered on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this video shows just how far those people spread across the country when they went home, possibly taking SARS-CoV-2 with them. They go everywhere.
Show of hands: who feels uncomfortable being reminded of the extent to which 3rd party companies know the location of our cellphones? With tools like the one demonstrated in the video & other easily available info, it has to be trivial to identify individuals by name using even “randomized” data and so-called metadata. (via @stewartbrand)
If anyone’s equipped to perform during a pandemic, it’s The Flaming Lips. Even before the pandemic, the band’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, often could be found performing inside a giant bubble. For their appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night, the band expanded on that concept. Not only did Coyne’s bandmates each get their own bubble, so too did the audience gathered to watch their performance of “Race For the Prize”. Catch the replay below.
“Race For the Prize” appears on The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Recently, the band teamed with Kacey Musgraves for a new song called “Flowers of Neptune 6”. They also released Deap Lips, a collaborative album with the garage rock duo Deap Vally.
First obvious association coming to my mind is with the visionary projects by Haus-Rucker-Co, from the late 60s on:
Put into the context of Haus-Rucker-Co’s general use of inflatables, as well as today’s emerging fresh-air market—with multiple links explaining this in the actual post—I suggest that what was once an almost absurdist art world provocation has, today, in the form of bottled air, become an unexpectedly viable business model. (Source: BLDGBLOG)
[Image: Haus-Rucker-Co, Grüne Lunge (Green Lung), Kunsthalle Hamburg (1973); photo by Haus-Rucker Co, courtesy of the Archive Zamp Kelp; via Walker Art Center, via BLDGBLOG]
This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project and seminal study The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). It sought to understand how the types of new public spaces have changed some 40 years after he published his book and companion film, what has changed in how people use public realm spaces, and what makes well used spaces.
The project first looked at 10 plazas in Manhattan by 10 different designers, constructed or renovated in the last 15 years. The sites range from the type of bonus plazas Whyte was observing, to infrastructural leftovers, alleys, transit plazas, private campus spaces, and tactical urbanist interventions. The team used new analytical tools such as a machine learning algorithm on video footage to develop heat maps describing dwell time, frequent and infrequent usage, and preliminary pedestrian counts.
The team also used some of the same techniques Whyte did—behavioral observations, site measurements, and hand tabulation. The goal was to identify common behavior patterns, collective activity, programming, physical elements, and understand context across the sites in order to inform future public realm design. Findings and methods were published in a booklet called Field Guide to Life in Urban Plazas. Currently, researchers are experimenting with an extension of the New York study on other international sites using infrared data that allows evening site usage to be captured, as well as a higher level of anonymization.
RESEARCH TEAM Emily Schlickman and Anya Domlesky, XL research and innovation Lab at SWA, Tom Balsley, Chella Strong, Jen Saura, and Hallie Morrison, SWA/Balsley, Anonymous, Data Scientist
This is a short drone tour of San Francisco with the shelter-in-place order in effect — it looks abandoned. Fisherman’s Wharf, downtown, Market Street, the Haight — I think I saw like 8 people total during the whole video. Heartening to see that people are taking shelter-in-place seriously.
For her series One Person City, photographer nicoco has been taking photos of Shanghai that emphasize how deserted the city was due to the COVID-19 outbreak that has killed more than 1000 people in China.
Along streets suddenly devoid of traffic, pedestrians get a fresh look at all the space that motor vehicles have commandeered.
The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front. During the coronavirus-induced lockdown, not many people are driving to work, shuttling kids on the school run, or sharing Ubers home from a Lower East Side bar. Vehicle traffic moves smoothly, now that it largely seems to consist of what traffic on urban streets arguably should consist of: the movement of goods to people, the movement of public transit, the movement of emergency responders and other essential services.
For people on the sidewalks, the situation is much different. Those islands of street-side serendipity where friends once spotted one another and stopped to chat—clusters that, as the urbanist William H. Whyte observed, so often happened at corners—suddenly seem like miasmatic hot zones.
Things that might have only slightly rankled before—the couple insisting on running side by side down a narrow sidewalk, the dog walker thoughtlessly unspooling a long leash, the large family strolling four abreast—are now sources of real anxiety. The usual strategies by which one pedestrian might avoid walking into another, such as ducking into the small patches of sidewalk space nestled between street trees and trash cans, are no longer sufficient. Also disconcerting is the sight of people walking in the street, or in bike lanes. At my local Trader Joe’s, a portion of the block-and-a-half-long line of would-be shoppers (stretched as it was by the six-foot intervals between them) extended into the street, close to traffic, presumably to keep the sidewalk free for walkers.
Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York. […]
The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletaloutline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.
The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscapes over to the car. [Full article]
Drones will transform cities, revolutionising how people travel, how goods are delivered and how buildings look and are constructed, according to a documentary by Dezeen.
Aerial highways will relieve pressure on roads as deliveries and human transportation take to the skies in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Architecture will change dramatically as the ground floor entrance is replaced by rooftop landing, parking and recharging zones and deliveries arrive via specially constructed portals on the sides of buildings, or rooftop platforms, built to accommodate drones.
This vision of the future is set out in Elevation, a new documentary created by online architecture magazine Dezeen (www.dezeen.com). Read an in-depth story about the movie here.
The 18-minute documentary was premiered at Public in New York on 20 May 2018. Further screenings are scheduled around the world over the coming months. See the full schedule of Elevation screenings here.
Louis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to make us all a lot smarter. The secret to this superhuman intelligence? Bees.
Rosenberg runs a Silicon Valley startup called Unanimous AI, which has built a tool to support human decision-making by crowdsourcing opinions online. It lets hundreds of participants respond to a question all at once, pooling their collective insight, biases and varying expertise into a single answer.
Since launching in June, Unanimous AI has registered around 50,000 users and answered 230,000 questions. Rosenberg thinks this hybrid human-computer decision-making machine – once dubbed an ‘artificial’ artificial intelligence – could help us tackle some of the world’s toughest questions. What’s more, with advances in AI coming thick and fast, he sees it as a way to put humans back into the loop. [Full article]
In Hong Kong, umbrellas are more than just protection from rain or glaring sunshine. They have become tools for expression, privacy and self-defense—and that’s made them a staple of the anti-government demonstrations that have rocked the city over the past three months.
The humble brolly has been a symbol of resistance in Hong Kong since 2014, when the city’s pro-democracy protests became known as the Umbrella Movement. Now, Hong Kong’s police force has labeled umbrellas as weapons, and Chinese e-commerce sites like Taobao and AliExpress no longer sell them to customers in Hong Kong.
“I tried to purchase umbrellas and I just can’t” on those platforms, said Kelvin Yeung, a 22-year-old university student who has participated in about half of the marches this summer. “I cannot put it into my basket if the destination is Hong Kong.”
Over the past 100-plus days, protesters have demonstrated dozens of ways to use umbrellas that have nothing to do with rain. Here are just a handful of examples, as well as what some protesters have to say about them. Many declined to give their full name for fear of punishment, and none are pictured.
“An estimated 1.7 million people in Hong Kong—A QUARTER OF THE POPULATION—defied police orders to stage a peaceful march after a rally in a downtown park, after two months of increasingly violent clashes that have prompted severe warnings from Beijing and failed to win concessions from the city’s government.
Huge crowds filled Victoria Park on Sunday afternoon and spilled on to nearby streets, forcing police to block traffic in the area. Torrential rain came down an hour into the rally, turning the park into a sea of umbrellas. At the same time, protesters walked towards Central, the heart of Hong Kong’s business district, and surrounded government headquarters.”
Map-based information is one of our biggest and richest assets at Uber. The billions of GPS points handled by our platform every day in real-time pose atypical challenges for real-time mapping visualizations and in-browser, data-dense visualizations. […]
Our tech stack for these applications consists on a few libraries that we developed and open sourced.react-map-gl provides a React-friendly layer on top of MapboxGL, a library from Mapbox that we use extensively at Uber. deck.gl provides an interface for creating WebGL-powered layers that can be put on top of a map or used standalone for creating abstract data visualizations. […]
We recently created a data visualization that explores how uberPOOL can have an impact in making cities’ transportation much more efficient. Behind Travis Kalanick in his TED Talk, you’ll see the data visualization we crafted to show traffic per street segment with and without uberPOOL, demonstrating POOL’s ability to make cities smarter by reducing traffic.
The interesting conclusion is that after about five minutes, the longer you wait, the longer you will have to wait. If you waited for 15 min, the medianadditional waiting time is another 8 minutes. But 8 minutes later if the train still hasn’t come, the median additional waiting time is now another 12 minutes.
So when should you give up waiting? One way to think about it is how much time you think it’s worth waiting. The time you already waited is “sunk cost” so it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how much additional time you are willing to wait. Let’s assume you want to optimize for a wait time that’s less than 30 min in 90% of the cases. Then the max time you should wait is about 11 minutes until giving up (this is at the point where the yellow line cuts the 30 min mark).
