Fade to Play

When I need to find my way around Vancouver such as visiting a friend or finding the address for a store I immediately go to Google Maps and punch in the address. I guess I could always call my friend, get a map and highlight the location. But I find that accessing a digital map is easier and more convenient.

That’s why I am super excited to read about Virtual City. It is a Canadian startup out of Toronto that was founded in 2005 in order to provide an online mapping tool. As noted in a Globe and Mail article, the pictures differ from Google Earth in that they celebrate urban experiences. Cameras are positioned on a car roof and the environment is snapped as it moves through the city providing unique photographs — people walking on the sidewalk, TTC streetcars, dumpsters in an alleyway — way cool.

VirtualCity worked its magic in a prosaic way: It strapped a high-definition camcorder to the roof of a car that was equipped with a GPS system whose job it was to keep precise track of where the camera was and when. VirtualCity’s creators then grabbed still frames from the footage, and correlated them to the map.

Unlike the distant satellite images that Google Maps uses, whose vast scope musters a sense of awe, VirtualCity’s photos are more like day-in-the-life snapshots. Pedestrians walk the sidewalks. Streetcars and fire trucks obscure edges of the frame. You can see the detritus on front porches, recycling in the alleys, cars parked on the margins and the tail ends of streetcars retreating out of view. It’s a celebration of the urban mundane.

Relevance: What memories do these photographs hold for the urban inhabitants? What would happen if people could submit pictures to complement the existing car-based photos used by Virtual City. How do these pictures change my perspective of my city or a city I want to go to? Whenever I see a TTC streetcar, I think about my experiences playing Live Action Scotland Yard in the summer of 2005. After playing games and designing games for urban environments, I am continually interested in how technology can be used to make visible seemingly mundane activities and artefacts. What would video add or take away from the experience of using this mapping tool?

Technorati Tags: urban, toronto, gps, ubicomp

I have heard of bears and birds (via pasta and vinegar) being tracked with GPS technology but I hadn’t heard about snow leopards being tracked until reading this BBC article in the Technology section.

Mr Spearing said: “This study is the first time GPS technology has been used to track snow leopards. It is going to give us very accurate, detailed knowledge of the size of the cats’ home range and the sort of day-to-day movements they make.” The collars, when fitted, use GPS to pin-point the exact position of the cats several times a day. This information is then beamed to researchers’ inboxes via the US-French Argos-satellite data-relay system.

Relevance: After using GPS technology in our “the Fugitive” location-based game, I am interested in other uses of GPS technology throughout the world.

Technorati Tags: gps, animals

Scott Golder at HP Labs who co-authored an excellent paper about del.icio.us may have now done the same for Facebook with a paper entitled “Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network” by Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman @ Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs.

Abstract

We have analyzed the fully anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online “friend” lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.

Relevance: I use Facebook quite regularly as a university student and I want to see how much I agree with the findings. I am also interested in sharing this paper with other regulars.

Technorati Tags: facebook, hp, socialnetworks, quantitative

So this is day 2 for the Water Advisory for Vancouver. I am fortunate that my lab has bottled water and that my residence has filtered water. It is currently unknown how long this advisory will last. I have been hearing reports of people hoarding water (Take a chill pill people). It reminds me of the panic buying that seems to parallel natural disasters that I hear about on the news.

Coming from Southwest Ontario where people died from E. coli poisoning in Walkerton, my family and I stopped drinking tap water many years ago. My parents only buy bottled water — better to be safe than sorry. It will be interesting to see how long this advisory lasts for and what the longer reprecusions are.

As noted in an article in today’s Globe and Mail.

Dr. Perry Kendall, the province’s chief health officer, said one concern is that the water supply could contain viruses, such as the norovirus and the E. coli bacteria, both of which can lead to diarrhea.

“The turbidity is very high and when it washes the topsoil, it can get contaminated with a lot of different things that you don’t want contaminating your water, such as wild animal feces,” Dr. Kendall said.

The advisory could last for weeks until the water supply clears. In 2000, people living in the Ontario town of Walkerton had to boil or buy their water for seven months after their supply was found to be unsafe. At least seven people died and more than 2,300 were sickened by E. coli found in it.

update: After going out to the campus Village for cold stuff and food, I went in 3 different stores, there is no bottled water anywhere. Sign at Shoppers Drug Mart says no water until TUESDAY. What would happen if we had a real emergency?

update: water advisory is over after 12 days. It ends the same day we had a 13 hour power outage on campus.

This 2006 research paper entitled “Our Lives in Digital Times” by G. Sciadas from Statistics Canada has just been released. It discusses how the notion that we have become a paperless society is a myth as the use of office technologies such as email have actually increased paper usage.

Statistics Canada found that:

Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full,

There are also social behavioural trends in ICT and communication that are discussed:

The pattern of communication and interaction has changed. The reality is that people are talking to other people – whether to the person next door or to someone thousands of miles and time zones away. Thus, it is not that people are becoming anti-social; it is that people are becoming differently social.

In summary, key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in shifting behavioural patterns everywhere, with real consequences. Moreover, the pattern of communications has changed, something exemplified by the rise in long distance and the explosion in international calling made possible by
liberalized markets and falling prices. Such expanded circles of communication have found an even better expression through e-mail that knows no boundaries. People make the choice to expand their associations and move from geographically defined communities to communities of interest. As well, they are willing to pay for their choices. ICT spending is on the rise and, within this higher spending, substitutions take place in favour of newer ICTs, such as the Internet, and against older ones, such as the telephone. The willingness of people to pay can also be seen by the fact that many low income households choose to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income on ICTs.

A summary of the report can be found in this CBC news report.

This report confirms finding from Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen who wrote The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) and found that paper usage increased on average 40% because of email in an organisation).

Relevance: Although offices are using paper more, I wonder about whether students are printing more in universities. I would say that they are printing less. I spend a significant time with my laptop around undergrads that I see reading papers in pdf form online on their laptop rather than printing them out. This may be due to convenience and a desire for cost savings. Perhaps, older people just feel more comfortable with paper.

Technorati Tags: cscw, cbc, harper, social, internet, email, technology, ict

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the ‘mobile’ issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal
between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed
journal. In 2007, M/C Journal celebrates its tenth year in publication.

To see what M/C Journal is all about, check out our Website, which contains
all the issues released so far, at <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>.
To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit
<http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/submission.php>.

Call for Papers: ‘mobile’
Edited by Larissa Hjorth & Olivia Khoo

Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. The mobile phone
has come of age. As an integral component of visual media cultures, camera
phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of
seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones have been
heralded as providing everyday users with the possibility of self-
expression and voice in the once unidirectional model of mass media. In
addition, the “exchange” and gift-giving economy underpinning mobile phone
practices (Taylor and Harper 2003) is further enunciated by the camera
phone’s ability to “share” moments between intimates (and strangers)
through various contextual frameworks and archives from MMS, blogs, virtual
community sites to actual face-to-face digital storytelling.

This is particularly the case in the Asia-Pacific region, where mobile
practices in locations such as Tokyo and Seoul have brought about new forms
of media use; for example, mobile phones are increasing being deployed to
connect to, among other things, Web 2.0’s burgeoning landscape of social
software. In much of the rhetoric of current media criticism, users are
being interpellated as prosumers (producers plus consumers), but what is
the reality behind this so-called agency? Do users really feel empowered by
the structures of immediacy connected to user-generated content (UGC)? Are
they ‘liberated’ by the multi-media functions of the mobile phone or is the
increasing convergence of mobile media causing more complications than
pleasures?

This issue of M/C Journal seeks papers exploring the role of convergent
mobile technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. The issue aims to explore
the socio-cultural particularities of various adaptations of mobile media,
from case studies on mobile communication in the Asia Pacific, to cross-
cultural analyses of the transborder flows of mobile media production,
representation and consumption. Topics may include:

- Convergent mobile technologies
- The use of mobile technologies in the construction, regulation and upkeep
of social software and virtual communities
- Pervasive mobile gaming
- Mobile communication case studies in the region
- The role of co-presence and maintenance of intimacy and community through
mobile communication
- The “future” of mobile media
- Creativity and mobile media; the aesthetics of mobile media
- Critiques of prosumer rhetoric in mass media
- Emerging forms of techno-nationalism and governmental policies around
‘mobility’ and digital convergent cultures
- The changing role of temporality and spatiality in contemporary case
studies of mobile telephony

Submit your essays of 3000 words in length to the editors at
mobile@journal.media-culture.org.au.

Article deadline: 17 January 2007
Issue release date: 14 March 2007

M/C Journal was founded (as “M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture”) in 1998
as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting
of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C
Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page for
comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are blind
peer-reviewed.

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