An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.

I’m all for infographics but I find this a bit over the top. Edward Tufte would be apalled. Clair has done something similar for the equally tenebrous world of Mark Rich and Glencore.

Direction and Motion Graphics: Patrick Clair patrickclair.com
Written by: Scott Mitchell

Production Company: Zapruder’s Other Films

Getting all HAL 9000 [2001]: Introducing Siri, Apple‘s new voice recognition technology for iOS 5.

The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe.  With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1964)

Breathtaking footage by Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, filmed from an airship above the Western Front in the summer of 1919.

Love and Power, the first installment of Adam Curtis’ new television series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, is a film documentary that combines provocative argument with surreal juxtaposition of archive image and sound.

Curtis’ principal claim is that by putting our faith in software and computing (in order to create a stable, democratic world order) we have become politically and economically naive and dulled to the process of real social change.

His story begins with the literary mind of Ayn Rand, a Russian intellectual who believed in an ideal she coined ‘objectivism’ – that all individuals should free themselves of political and religious control and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires – something Rand explored via the characterisation of architect Howard Roark in her 1943 book The Fountainhead.

Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self interest.

Curtis explains how Rand’s writing was broadly considered to be anti-establishment as man’s greed and selfishness had already caused the Great Depression of the 1930s, a crisis that struck at the heart of Western civilisation and one that arguably – through heightened nationalism in response to prolonged economic and social woe – became a key cause of the Second World War.

The job of politics, Curtis states, was to ‘manage and control the selfish desires of the individual.’

Rand died in 1981 but her writing had already spawned a new wave of Silicon Valley techno-entrepreneurs who were to fuel the dot-com boom of the 1990s, driven by renewed optimism surrounding the ongoing hardware and software revolution.

An idea was emerging in California that said that the new computer technologies could turn everyone into heroic individuals. It was a vision of society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary, because computer networks could create order in society without central control.

This have never happened before because at the heart of western political thought had always been a fear that if you allowed individuals too much freedom, you would get anarchy.

But ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers, then together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals – connected as nodes in the network – would work to create a self-stabilising system. The world would be stable and everyone would be heroic Randian beings, completely free to follow their desires.

One of the most interesting sequences of the film relives an experiment conducted in 1991 by leading computer engineer Loren Carpenter. It involved an auditorium full of people playing a single game of Pong. Each individual had the ability to affect the course of the game in realtime by alternating a hand-held baton between red and green – a signal that could be read automatically and then input back into the game. Carpenter had created an example of a society with no hierarchy, a society where everyone made their own decisions without guidance or governance.

Curtis’ story takes something of a turn with the introduction of Bill Clinton – a protagonist chosen presumably as the antithesis of Carpenter’s study – for his belief in the traditional sense of political power and administration. He also introduces Alan Greenspan, chief of the US Federal Reserve, who also happened to be one of Rand’s early collaborators.

Clinton’s rise to power in 1993 had coincided with an economic downturn with a huge national deficit needing to be reigned in. Contrary to his election manifesto, Clinton, acting on the chief advice of Greenspan, had no choice but to implement wide-ranging budget cuts. Greenspan’s theory was that if the government continued to spend, interest rates would rise, adding downward pressure to the broader economy. Instead he suggested Clinton cut national spending, keeping interest rates low, which in turn caused the markets to rally. As the boom gathered pace it was accompanied by a wave of investor confidence, the difference being the rise of the computing machine: Complex mathematical models could be run, enabling investors and institutions to calculate risk on an unprecedented scale. If risk could be quantified then it could be balanced and hedged against, reducing volatility and promoting stability.

This fundamental shift in the approach to investment was essentially the beginning of a period that Greenspan later coined as ‘irrarional exuberance’ before the subsequent revocation of his branding in favour of the New Economy.

Whilst the economic surge of the 1990s was to end with the dot-com bubble burst of 2000, the true impact was yet to become apparent. The approach to calculable risk took a spectacular turn in 2008 with the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the effects and exposure to which were to be felt worldwide. Computers and the rise of the Internet had deepened the crisis, effectively boosting levels of globalisation, interconnectedness and interdependency. As Curtis aptly summarises:

What some people were beginning to see was that the computer networks and the global systems they had created hadn’t distributed power. They had just shifted it – and if anything – concentrated it in new forms. And some of the computer utopians from Silicon Valley were also beginning to realise that the world wide web was not a new kind of democracy.

Just as the computer had revolutionised the economy, cyberspace had begun to revolutionise society instead through human communication and interaction. A darker side had begun to emerge. As Carmen Hermosillo, cyberspace theorist and analyst remarks:

In the nineteenth century commodities were made in factories by workers who were mostly exploited. I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to … and that commodity was sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment.

Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then represents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion, and we are getting lost in the spectacle.

Yet in 2011 the subsequent rise of this so-called commodification seems unstoppable. With the recent stratospheric multi-annual-revenue-busting valuations of Facebook, LinkedIn, not to mention Skype and Twitter – it is hard not to assume that this indelible cycle has begun to repeat itself. The issue of ownership is something of increasing concern: social media is commodity to the Information Age as coal and steam were to the Industrial Revolution.

Loren Carpenter’s model of a society with no hierarchy, guidance or governance is certainly a utopian vision. Its closest ideological manifestation could be that of Wikipedia – self-regulating, open source (essentially anti-capitalist) virtual entities. A symbol of progress in an otherwise confused world order – the economic inter-dependency of China and the US as well as the ongoing intimacy between politician and banker being two such examples. From the latter stems a certain sense of irony regarding Ayn Rand’s theory of objectivism and opposition to altruism.

I’m not sure what it all means for the world of tomorrow but Curtis’ inimitable style, a flitty fusion of iconic world events – from political and economic to terrorist and scandal, along with the poignant overlay of sound, is as captivating as it is educating.

Love and Power, Part One of Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace aired on BBC Two on 23 May 2011.

by the clever people at Stamen. A system (limited) of linking urban blocks with their corresponding lot certificate from the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office.

Another project funded by 4ip, Mapumental is a mapping application that enables a user to visualise a dynamic range of linked datasets based upon custom input parameters. The above example relates public transport journey times to a given location in relation to the average house price index. It is currently under beta testing so there isn’t much in the way of release information.

4ip look to be involved with a range of interesting projects like Audioboo and Newspaper Club.

Funded by 4iP and built by BERG (see also Incidental Media), Schooloscope shows you quickly and simply how schools within a given search area are progressing according to the information presented within official documents like Ofsted reports and DCSF Performance Tables. An innovative web-application, it rates schools across a range of criteria such as the quality of teaching, attendance and exam results before publicising the results in a concise, easy- to-read format. A more extensive guide to how it works can be read here.

Blankenberge Public Library by Sergison Bates.

What if you could see what your life would have been like if you had chosen a different path, made a different decision, or taken the road less traveled? What if you could see what a copy of yourself is doing in an alternate universe? The Quantum Parallelograph is an exploratory project developed by Patrick Stevenson-Keating that examines the scientific and philosophical ideas of quantum physics and multiple universes and how they might be explored by individuals. Using online souces, the Quantum Parallelograph retrieves information about the “parallel life” of the user and prints out a brief description about what their “copy” is up to.

ConnectiCity transforms the architectonic surfaces of cities into a new layer of reality built through communication, information and the visions of people. Launched for the first time in Rome, at the Festa dell’Architettura organized by the city administration and the Order of the Architects under the form of the “Atlante di Roma”, ConnectiCity has been implemented in multiple versions. Each version allowed for the transformation of the architectural surfaces of the city into a digital conversation sphere. Information gathered in real time from social networks, databases of the visions of citizens on the city, instant visualizations of data regarding the city, its energetic, transport, social profiles. The city narrates other stories found in data, in the interconnections of people, their dreams and possibilistic perception of the place they live in, and in the life of the city itself, as gathered from sensors and systems. ConnectiCity fosters a new way to percieve the city, including new kinds of citizenship: more informed, active and participatory.

via visualizing.org | ConnectiCity at AOS | ConnectiCity at FakePress | the Atlas of Rome at AOS

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.

POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC

Cities are back in vogue – intellectually, at least. (In the real world, cities were never out of fashion. The world’s population has been moving to them at a more or less steady clip for thousands of years.)

First there was the late Jane Jacobs, who argued that while nations were political units, the proper way to think about economies was to start with the economies of cities. Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and London are entirely distinct economies – Jacobs even suggested that they should be using separate currencies.

More recently, the journalist David Owen explained in The New Yorker that city living – with compact apartments and public transport – was far greener than the typical rural or suburban lifestyle. This point should have been obvious, but wasn’t.

Now the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser announces The Triumph of the City in a new book, while the journalist Greg Lindsay and business school professor John Kasarda offer a book about the Aerotropolis – a new breed of cities “umbilically connected” to their airports. Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted that nation states would be supplanted by city states by 2036.

But on this question, no one is more radical than Paul Romer. Romer’s first career was as the most influential growth theorist of his generation; he was then a successful entrepreneur. Now he beats the drum for “charter cities” as a radical solution to the problem of poverty.

Like all cities, charter cities are built on land, populated by people and run according to certain rules. What is unique is that the land, the people and the rules might come from entirely different sources – in one of Romer’s more controversial illustrations, Canada buys the Guantánamo Bay lease from the Americans and establishes a kind of new Hong Kong populated by Caribbean workers.

Romer now seems to be downplaying the Guantánamo angle, but still emphasises the idea of a guarantor country – France and Norway helping run a city state in Mauritius, for example. It sounds crazy, but he has his reasons. When I met Romer in London last year, he was concerned about the credibility of the city’s institutions. Because a city is costly to build, much of its infrastructure will last for decades. Romer argues that investors will not bite without a steady (Canadian? Norwegian?) hand on the tiller.

Perhaps he is right, but there is another angle to charter cities, which offer the opportunity to experiment with new rules that do not apply elsewhere. Cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong have prospered because the rules there have been conducive to doing business. Perhaps countries do not really need to outsource new cities; perhaps a special economic zone will be credible enough.

Take New Songdo, a conurbation close to Seoul. For Greg Lindsay, New Songdo is an aerotropolis, notable for its proximity to Incheon airport. I think its quasi-charter status is more important: South Korean politicians privately admit that New Songdo is attractive because businesses can be offered light-touch regulations without seeding a political storm.

Romer is not immune to the charms of air travel – he mentioned to me that 40 per cent of trade, by value, is now by air – but his charter city vision emphasises an angle largely overlooked by the global elite: that “the market in the city business right now is poor people”. Romer regards Dubai, because it is merely a millionaire’s playground, “as a failure, even before the bust”.

There, to me, is the real radicalism and the real insight: that building cities could become a business in its own right. And as with any dynamic industry, some of these city-businesses will flourish magnificently. Others will fail.

via FT.com, the original article is available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bbcdd63c-5a6d-11e0-8367-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1IYdWTjLw

Tim Harford’s latest book is ‘Dear Undercover Economist’ (Little, Brown)

Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

I’m not sure I agree with all that is said but I find the concept of ‘technosocial’ wormholes interesting, i.e. the bending of time and space albeit via mobile telecommunications. This reminds me of the Situationist International’s ‘dérives’ throughout Amsterdam in 1959, where they effectively linked different parts of the city via walkie-talkie.

Bestiario, a tech start-up based in Barcelona have been exploring and inventing new interactive visualisation methods for the past 5 years. With a vast and hugely impressive back catalogue, their most recent triumph is a web application called Impure.

Currently at 0.9 alpha, Impure is a visual programming language that is able to gather, process and visualise a diverse range of information and data. It is quite similar to Yahoo Pipes albeit with a much greater focus on data visualisation. I am interested in this because of its relevance to my Thesis, in particular my hypothetical (and unfinished) City Dynamics visualisation.

The provocation was the ‘wiring’ together of a range of existing data feeds from the Web in order to create a realtime spatio-temporal database of the city. An urban ‘dashboard’ would be used to visualise the rhythms and fluctuations occurring within the city, with a range of events mapped ranging from seconds and minutes to weeks and years. It would not only be possible to apply conventional statistical analysis (moving averages, rates of change, volatility, relative strength etc. etc.), certain layers could also be mapped within the city using virtual geometry as precursor to full-scale urban AR (augmented reality).

I am interested in Impure because it has the initial capabilities required to develop such a system. An extract from the developers:

With Impure it is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more. Impure is a tool to be in touch with data around internet, to deeply understand it. Within a modular logic interface you can quickly link information to operators, controls and visualization methods, bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way.

Video by m ss ng p eces
Executive producer Jason Wishnow
Produced by Ari Kuschnir and Ben Nabors
Directed by Josh Nussbaum (m ss ng p eces)
Filmed by Josh Nussbaum and Todd Banhazl
Edited by Adam McClelland

Music Supervision and Rights Coordination by
Samuel Valenti IV & Jeremy Peters at Ghostly Songs Music Supervision
“Legume Minimal”
Written by Benjamin Mullins
Performed by Ben Benjamin
© 2009 Copyright Control
Licensed Courtesy Benjamin Mullins
“Legume Shotgun”
Written by Benjamin Mullins
Performed by Ben Benjamin
© 2009 Copyright Control
Licensed Courtesy Benjamin Mullins
“Locks”
Written by Jeff McIlwain
Performed by Lusine + David Wingo
© 2006 Ghostly Songs
Licensed Courtesy Ghostly International
From the Album: Idol Tryouts Two: Ghostly International Vol. 2
“Flowers Into Stardust”
Written and Perfomed by Christopher Willits
© 2010 Overlap Music
Licensed Courtesy Ghostly International Under Exclusive License from
Christopher Willits
From the Album: Tiger Flower Circle Sun
“Viper Skies”
Written by Jason Corder
Performed by Offthesky
© 2009 Copyright Control
Licensed Courtesy Jason Corder

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. “Culturomics” extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Whereas the conventional trend analysis (based on a cumulative Web search frequency) began in 2004, the raw data is instead generated from a data mining of Google Books, spanning from 1800 to 2000.

Below are a selection of trends I find interesting, make your own mind up on the culturomics. The Books Ngram Viewer is accessible here.

An interesting concept I have been reading about recently is a that of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, which is something that appears to be championed by a British company called Zopa – an enterprise that derives its name from the ‘zone of possible agreement’ – in other words, the intellectual zone during which business parties are able to strike a deal.

Open source banking is probably a bit of a pseudo term for p2p lending but I refer to it as such because I am more interested in what the future holds, with respect to finance as a whole.

Zopa, with its company mantra ‘where everybody wins, except the fat cats’, at the time of writing had a sum of £4,679,127 ‘available on the markets’ and since its inception in 2005 has successfully completed over £100m in lending. It works by actively matching borrowers and lenders across a range of credit ratings (set relative to the perceived risk – A*, A, B, C, Y) – a bit like Betfair.com, but of the debt markets.

The most attractive thing is that the interest rates across all credit ratings are significantly better for both parties than an equivalent retail offering. Zopa charge a commission of course but the fees pale in comparison when you consider real market rates. Overall risk is managed by the fact that each and every debt is spread automatically between fifty separate borrowing parties; in the event of default the extent of bad debt is just a fraction of the original liability.

Whilst Zopa cannot be classified as a bank,  it is undoubtedly commercial. The question is: could banking ever become open source? Could it unwind so-called ‘fat cat’ culture and stem the seemingly relentless rise of the world’s super-banks?

The 7th December saw (King) Eric Cantona’s peaceful attempt to destroy the banks pass unnoticed. There was never much of a concern as it seems the only big risk relates primarily to fear, driven by risk of collapse in an event such as a liquidity crisis. Admittedly, it was never going to work on a large enough scale to pose real threat; the fear of keeping one’s life savings beneath a mattress easily outweighs the former. But what if the open source model expanded slowly: personal debt at first, then into bonds and even mortgages as more and more money is fixed between private institutions and investors, only directly.

Banking has become so incredibly complex, the deliberate and excessive over-complication of sub-prime mortgage related derivatives – to name the single major cause of the global banking collapse – the result of which (we must not forget) is now causing society far more significant problems, completely disproportionate to the actual cost to the offending institutions. The recent banking reforms will undoubtedly change that but only by so much, the system will always find a way to transcend.

The open source model fundamentally devalues a given market, it cannot therefore be applied to everything. Whilst it is both suitable and progressive for many things (I keenly await the alternative to Facebook, Diaspora) it surely could not apply to large-scale investment banking/brokering/insurance etc. where the expertise of the profession is integral. We have the advent of microcredit in the developing world and the not-for-profit Charity Bank, the UK’s first not-for-profit savings and investment bank. These are surely signs of a more intelligent, de-centralised, open source, moralistic and above all social approach, but it may be a very long time before such a future becomes a reality.

Created by visual artist Candas Sisman and inspired by the work of İlhan Koman, F L U X is quite breathtaking. It is a virtual architecture in a contant state of morphosis, a form that transcends any manual or analogue equivalent. In a funny way, this is how I imagine an alien from outer space: a creature that somehow lives in a black hole.

İlhan Koman’s unique design approach in his form studies also inspires contemporary art works. The video installation Flux by young artist Candaş Şişman can be defined as a digital animation which is inspired from the structural features of some of İlhan Koman’s works like Pi, 3D Moebius, Whirlpool and To Infinity… A red circle, which is colored in reference to the red radiators of Ogre, is traced in a morphological transformation which re-interprets the formal approach of Koman’s works. The continuous movement sometimes connotes the formal characteristics of Pi, 3D Moebius, Whirlpool and To Infinity…, as well as the original formal interpretations of the design principles of the works . In Flux, Koman’s design process in the making of the Pi series has been treated as the emerging of a sphere from a two-dimensional circle by the principle of increasing the surface; and that simple direction is re-interpreted in digital medium. Thanks to this, in the digital animation an entirely different form serial that does not resemble Pi yet remaining its design principle can be followed through the flow of a circle to the sphere. As a conscious attitude of the artist, this work is not designed in a direct visual analogy with Koman’s works. During the animation, none of the moments of the transforming form look like Pi or 3D Moebius, however the subjective reading of Koman’s approach can be observed.

Maths, English, Geography… whatever else people think about education, it’s taken for granted that children will attend classes in a range of disciplines. But what if they didn’t? What if they studied just one topic – such as apples – from age six, until they graduated, as experts, aged 18? It might sound barmy, but the proposal has been put forward by a serious educationalist, Kieran Egan, of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, and it kind of makes sense, says Kate Julian.

For a start, the focus isn’t nearly as narrow as it sounds. Take the child assigned to study apples: first he draws them, then he catalogues the varieties. Later he collects stories about apples (from the Garden of Eden to William Tell and Isaac Newton) and studies why they float. The study of dust, on the other hand, could take a child from house dust to the Dust Bowl to the origins of the planet. It’s only by studying a subject in depth, argues Egan, that children can really appreciate knowledge. And it’s a method that crosses educational battle lines: traditionalists like the rigour involved, modernisers like the way it lets pupils study at their own pace. Of the 2,000 or so children studying under his method, not one has dropped out. As for parents – apparently they’re enthusiastic, too. For now. “Check back in 12 years.”

Kate Julian originally wrote in The Washington Post, via The Week magazine.

Incidental Media is a film sketch by Dentsu London as part of their ongoing ‘Making Future Magic’ strategy:

Making Future Magic was partly conceived as a way to avoid making horrible use of media that makes everyone feel like Chief John Anderton.  But also (and mostly) as something that would help us think about the most exciting creative possibilities opening up in a continually shifting and multiplying media landscape, where the scope of communications broadens to encompass and meld service, product and software with more traditional advertising.

The thing I most enjoy about the film is the simple notion that whilst the range and frequency of media is ever-increasing, the resulting communication should be more about personalisation and refinement. I am not sure whether some of the illustrated examples are actual realities (such as the Guardian headline or Foursquare update printed on the receipt) but these are clever yet understated ideas. Schulze describes media becoming more pervasive and ‘ambiently available’, alikening it to the quiet expectation of the clock in telling us the time.

Admittedly, there is something seductive about the way it is filmed; an almost perfect advert when in reality it may not be so. There is a lot to be said for the interface design, the way that subtle animation and almost retro tickerboard approach help to promote a communication that is both intelligent, seamless and tranquil.

The second film, The Journey is another take on the above this time focusing on a single train trip, which again is enhanced by subtle personal media. This time, the ‘industrial archaeology of the landscape’ is described using piggybacked train tickets, informing the passenger of a bygone age whilst rolling through the countryside.