The recent surge in hate group activity is a concern to many citizens and policymakers. We examine the roles of socioeconomic factors measured at the county level that are hypothesized to account for the presence of such groups, including social capital and religious affiliations.
Both social capital stocks and religious affiliation exert an independent and statistically significant influence on the number of hate groups, as does the presence of Wal-Mart stores, holding other factors constant.
Category: Urban
Project Glass and the Perils of Not Shipping
I guess today we will be talking about Project Glass by Google today on the Internets:
We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A group of us from Google started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.
If you can get past the very horrible industrial design of the glasses – a kind of cross between Geordi’s VISOR and a Orthodontic headgear – you slam right into the meat of the issue: why would you let an advertising company know and see where you are doing at every minute of the day:
There’s some incredible Orwellian doublespeak at work here, e.g., technology that “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.” As far as I can tell, it doesn’t help you to explore your world at all. It helps Google to explore your world.
Additionally, from the video all I see is the same well-worn interaction clichés: overlay icons showing weather updates, emails and instant messages and route finding. Heads Up Displays which overlay data and information are great for specific functions requiring extreme concentration or placing discreet data which eliminates repetitive distraction. Think landing the Space Shuttle, or more everyday, driving on the highway and needing to know your speed. However, they aren’t great at supporting constantly shifting tasks and needs – tasks and needs which are situated in the urban environment will be contradictory and computationally dense.
On a lighter, but equally important note: what New Yorker doesn’t know how to get to Strand? A bookstore which, not to underplay this, is on Broadway and 12th Street not 12th and University as the video shows:
Below is the actual directions to Strand, via (wait for it) Google Maps:
Even this is wrong: who in their right mind wouldn’t just walk down Park and then Broadway? Come on Google: you are a mapping service for pete’s sake.
Finally, the images of the actual product are underwhelming to say the least – and quite possibly a joke: I can’t take seriously the tiny white bar actually holds the following (off the top of my head):
- Battery plus charging port
- Display
- 3g/Edge radio
- microphone
- speaker
- main processor
- graphics processor
- camera
- I/O (bluetooth or micro USB)
This is why John Gruber’s comments, The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos, are so apt and damning:
The designs in these concept videos are free from real-world constraints — technical, logical, fiscal. Dealing with constraints is what real design is all about. Institutional attention on the present day — on getting innovative industry-leading products out the door and creating consumer demand for them — requires relentless company-wide focus.
Compare the Google Glasses videos, with the work my friend Adam Greenfield and company at Urban Scale did with their Project Perry (Farevalue) exploration of adding an e-paper display to the standard RFID-based stored-value card:
Our Farevalue project is intended to address some of the minor but real frustrations people experience with RFID-based stored value cards.
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But what if you had a way to know how much remained on your card before you hit the turnstile, and it didn’t require tapping on a reader? What if that information was presented to you in a friendly way, at a sufficient size that you could read it at a glance from across the room?
Project PERRY: technical proof-of-principle (version 0.1) from Urbanscale on Vimeo.
Project PERRY: Farevalue technical prototype from Urbanscale on Vimeo.
The difference between Farevalue and Google Glass is startling: Urban Scale actually shipped a complete idea and implementation prototype. They did the hard work of prototyping both the interaction and the hardware needed to solve a real-world problem. Google Glass appears to be a solution in need of a problem, coupled with a lack of real-world engineering knowledge. Google hasn’t gone through the pain, sweat, tears and cursing to actually prototype their concept. Rather, they have done is throw a – to be fair nicely crafted – set of glasses on pretty people and crank out a video.
The Google Glass announcement, and the glossy photo format, doesn’t get me excited, it does exactly the opposite. It makes me wonder if Google Glass will join the pantheon of other Google products: Buzz, Wave, Labs and the rest of the graveyard.
Jonathan McIntosh created ADmented Reality, a slightly more realistic version of Google’s augmented reality glasses – now featuring contextual Google Ads!
Survey of Reaction: “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”
Reality Check: Developers React to MoMA’s Show, “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”:
But during a panel on March 8 at the museum sponsored by the Forum for Urban Design, two developers, an architecture professor, and a real estate lawyer reacted soberly to the adventurous and optimistic schemes. Though the panelists agreed that the foreclosure crisis will lead to major changes in suburban development, they all thought new patterns are less likely to be brought about by a revised American dream than by economic and demographic factors. And all said it would be very difficult to change zoning laws to permit denser new development patterns, especially in existing “inner-ring” suburbs.
Financing suburban architecture:
My main beef with the show is that it’s far too utopian and impractical. That’s par for the course when it comes to museum architecture shows, but I was hoping for more realistic proposals in this particular case, just because the foreclosure crisis is so real and urgent.
Dream Deferred: The Museum of Modern Art’s “Foreclosed” exhibit is long on art and short on reality.
Any honest attempt to fix the suburbs has to start with facing up to why so many Americans live in the suburbs in the first place, and who those Americans are. Suburban families are bigger than urban families; they like their space; and they like living in places where they’re a good distance from their neighbors and a long way indeed from people of other social classes.
The True Cost of Unwalkable Streets
On the The True Cost of Unwalkable Streets in the States. Come to India, and see another dimension: loss of life and frequent injuries.
Roma, Borgo Pio
Borgo Pio, originally uploaded by razzmatazz75
Figure Ground: Borgo (rioni di Roma) 1829
Borgo, rioni (neighborhood) di Roma, stands just outside S. Pietro and has been greatly altered throughout the ages. Borgo historically has acted as the forecourt to S. Pietro, even prior to the imposition of the Via della Conciliazione by Mussolini in 1936. It also has this awesome seal:
Le Corbusier and La Ville Radieuse
During our Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities book club many ideas and movements will be discussed, ideas which are not particularly en vogue at the moment.
Le Corbusier, Swiss-born French architect of considerable fame is never out of vogue, but some of his more radical ideas have fallen considerably out of favor with the intelligentsia. La Ville radieuse, his 1935 opus on urban thought is one of those items. Envisioned as an antidote to the filth of the (mostly European) cities which were just beginning to be rebuilt from the horrors of the World War; the logical planning of this machine city was conceived as a centrally-planned community of the now-famous towers in parks.
LeCorbusier and the Radiant City Contra True Urbanity and the Earth:
The Radiant City grew out of this new conception of capitalist authority and a pseudo-appreciation for workers’ individual freedoms. The plan had much in common with the Contemporary City – clearance of the historic cityscape and rebuilding utilizing modern methods of production. In the Radiant City, however, the pre-fabricated apartment houses, les unites, were at the center of “urban” life. Les unites were available to everyone (not just the elite) based upon the size and needs of each particular family. Sunlight and recirculating air were provided as part of the design. The scale of the apartment houses was fifty meters high, which would accommodate, according to Corbusier, 2,700 inhabitants with fourteen square meters of space per person. The building would be placed upon pilotus, five meters off the ground, so that more land could be given over to nature. Setback from other unites would be achieved by les redents, patterns that Corbusier created to lessen the effect of uniformity.
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Corbusier spends a great deal of the Radiant City manifesto elaborating on services available to the residents. Each apartment block was equipped with a catering section in the basement, which would prepare daily meals (if wanted) for every family and would complete each families’ laundry chores. The time saved would enable the individual to think, write, or utilize the play and sports grounds which covered much of the city’s land. Directly on top of the apartment houses were the roof top gardens and beaches, where residents sun themselves in Anatural” surroundings – fifty meters in the air. Children were to be dropped off at les unites’ day care center and raised by scientifically trained professionals. The workday, so as to avoid the crisis of overproduction, was lowered to five hours a day. Women were enjoined to stay at home and perform household chores, if necessary, for five hours daily. Transportation systems were also formulated to save the individual time. Corbusier bitterly reproaches advocates of the horizontal garden city (suburbs) for the time wasted commuting to the city. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently. Corbusier called it the vertical garden city.
Edward Scissorhands
This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.
Or, how suburbia [and by extension America] loves conformity and percieved safety
This paper discussed the movie Edward Scissorhands [1990] and the reflection of religion, the corporation and society has on the formation of the city. Polemical in nature, it is not a denouncement of religion, instead it acknowledges the powerful role of religion in society, and how this important part of life shapes our space [and place] in the world.
Edward Scissorhands is the collection of fables and fairy tales not only from the collective history of man, but also from recent American experiences. The classic Frankenstein and Pinocchio story is contrasted with the distinctly American thrill of the new and the allure of progress with the paranoia of the other. The highly stylized neighborhood does not cover the daemons of distrust and isolation that are so eloquently played to by the “Christian” fundamentalist, nor does the blind search for success cover the fractures in the interpersonal relationships of the characters. In the last review, even love cannot triumph over the power of conformity.