ggalaxy

Remember that last Prada show where the girls kept falling down?

I was wondering if anyone got the shot - the hand on the right is me catching one of the girls as she fell.

The young lady in this photo had already fallen three times before she reached me and fell again about five steps past me. I have never seen a more terrified girl on the runway - it was very difficult to watch. Finally she took the shoes off and walked in bare feet the rest of the way. A lot of people had thought that the reason the girls kept falling was because the heels were too high. Actually, it was the little cotton socks that were inside the shoes. The girls couldn't keep their heels in the shoes correctly. If you think Lara Stone looks stern in her everyday life, she looked five times more serious trying to make it around the maze/catwalk in those shoes.

Did Miuccia ever explain her side of why the girls kept slipping? Maybe the samples were late and they were not able to check them correctly?

Today's fivedollarcomparisons: delivery of (priceless) pieces of art to a nearby gallery in Seoul (photo by Ron Saunders) versus delivery of a relieved tourist on a one way burro ride to the east crater lake Laguna del Quiotao, Equador (Xona808) versus delivery of a human being - a taxi ride within the city limits with an English driver in Kabul - a city with a high degree of kidnap paranoia (your's truly).

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Want to know what you sound like to others? Cup your hand around your ear and speak. To what extent does knowing what you sound like change what you decide to say?

Been playing around with the new glimpse-the-future Google voice search application for the iPhone, that copes with my Caucasian-male-non-Californian voice with an unnerving mixture of precision and humour. Yeah, voice search has been around for a while - just not quite so accessible.

How do the things that people search for using voice differ from those that are typed in - not only in terms of complexity but in terms of content? It's one thing to type "nearest hostess bar European ending", "full back waxing discount voucher" or "cash in a hurry" but another to say it out loud. You might think that mainstream voice search will be restricted to places where you have a degree of privacy, like say a car or home - but there are a number of reasons why that's not going to be the case: the first is that some of the world's 800+million illiterate people voice is the enabler - it opens up a new window to the world; for some voice will be the dominant and preferred way of searching in a particular context and this preferred way will 'leak" into other contexts. There is a cognitive cost to switching modalities e.g. typing to mouse, touch to voice - which might be summed up as "it feels right" even if socially it's not the kind of behaviour you like to see in other people or expect from yourself. But the main reason why you're going to see voice search finding it's way into the background noise on our streets, playgrounds, cafes and waiting rooms is that it ushers in a whole new way of projecting to people in proximity our aspirations and intent whether it's "Porsche car rental LAX", "yoga retreat in Hokkaido" or "Nike 2010's".

What happens to the recorded search terms? A massive dataset will be needed to improve the service, and will Google (now or in the future) forgo the advertising opportunities that will come from archiving the oral you? There are many ways for those recordings to make their way into the public domain: through surreptitious 3rd party applications on your device; recording the overheard; or simply on the (personal) assumption that everything that passes through the network is monitored by something or someone - the only question is whom, and their intent now and in the future.

In our orally enriched future perfect what new services does a lifetimes worth of voice searches enable? Well for one, that phone call you just had informing you of a new bar opening around the corner sounded just like your ex-girlfriend right? Uncanny that. What message would be best delivered by what voices from your past? From our past?

Can you hear me now? Do you have a choice?

Indeed.

Manga themed photos? There are taboos associated with a suited salarimen reading manga on the train, but it is far less of a problem when the manga is consumed on the mobile phone. For every medium, different levels of public display.

"Data is missing at least five things, all of which be-come both necessary and possible in a world of globally distributed computing: 1) Ownership, 2) Error bars, 3) Sensitivity, 4) Dependency, 5) Semantics. ... Unfortunately, a lot of the major data movers benefit from not knowing how meaningful their numbers are. A credit bureau just reports the numbers it got from somewhere else; if it were easy to find out how those numbers were collected, then demands for quality control would increase."

I was chit-chatting with Susan after I took this picture and mentioned that I thought her hair was sooo beautiful - her best feature.

She said thanks and added that she had lost her hair once because of cancer. She now purposely keeps it long because she feels it is such a gift to have it back and, for her, a sign of life.

It seems the Italians are dying to find new Agnelli-isms.

Apparently leaving the strap of your monkstrap shoes undone is all the rage. Usually I only see it done with double monkstraps, but this brave Italian was throwing caution (and safety) to the wind and had the straps on both shoes undone.

I'm not condoning, just reporting.

I love that Carine is always happy to stop and talk or have her picture taken with her fans.

Carine shows a genuine interest - Carine asked this young lady where she was from.

The girl walked away just beaming.

Earlier tonight I briefly met Spencer Salazar from Smule, the makers of the iPhone Ocarina. They have a small suite of like Sonic Boom ("turns your phone into a virtual firecracker"), Sonic Vox ("the real-time voice shifter"), and Sonic Lighter ("Sonic Lighter is a lighter") that are mostly technology gimmicks. Spencer admitted as much but I'm still completely smitten with the fact that 75% of their applications have a simple globe view that uses the network features of the phone to show you what other people, all around the world, are doing with each app right now. You can hear other people's clumsy ocarina playing, watch little explosions when other people use Sonic Boom, and see who's using the lighter app with some sense of how those people are related to you based on flame-passing connections.

We've seen this all before, in Twittervision and other such globetrotting applications. These Smule globes seem strangely different and much more interesting, largely I think because you hold the phone in your hand instead of the laptop or monitor on your desk. It's a more personal, touched engagement with the screen that makes visualizing an earth-spanning army of phone lighters and flute blowers more physically personal. In particular, the Sonic Boom visualization is like watching television: no reading, no place names, just tiny explosions with audio all over the world with the same unmediated appearance as old top-down resource gathering games like War Craft I.

Having just read Teeming Void's Against Information (a critique of "data art"), I'm thinking about direct perception of data as a way of making it more visceral. The Golan Levin and Jonathan Harris pieces referenced in the paper all suffer from various forms of indirection: Levin makes breaking up look like math and physics, while Harris jumps to all sorts of crazy conclusions based on faulty language parsing and excessively abstract visual metaphor. How can a visual representation of data make itself felt right there, in your hand? Pictures help. Sound helps.

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Today's five dollar comparisons: a live chicken from Kabale (photo by Ben Konrath), Uganda versus 228g of Mortadella ham from Rio de Janeiro (William Yau) versus Spicy Duck Necks from Shanghai Airport (ED209uk).

The ham slices are eating at a leisurely pace, the live chicken is as much as can be eaten by a local family in one sitting - a lack of refrigeration for this family in Kabale means that any food left overnight would go off by the morning, and spicy duck necks are souvineers with little likelihood of ever being eaten. Food for thought, eh?

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Photos above taken from the fivedollarcomparson.org site - they make more sense with the notes posted here

You're on your way to meet up with friends and only realise after 5 minutes that you've left your mobile phone at home - what do you do? If you're like me you mutter a curse under your breath, retrace your steps and retrieve your phone. But what the cost of obtaining a new phone was radically different than today, what if you could pick up a new phone at the convenience store or from a vending machine for only $5 - and painlessly sync your contacts and other personal data from the network? Now what would you do?

Today over half the world's population has a mobile phone, and for the remaining 3.3 billion cost is the primary barrier to personal ownership. Advances in technology and manufacturing allow us to imagine a world where the price of a mobile phone is significantly lower than today, and the spread of low cost personal connectivity will continue to have a profound impact on the world around us: maybe for you it becomes a device that is disposable on a whim; whereas for someone else it provides access to a personal bank account for the first time.

To help us understand relative value of things and explore the consequences of that value my colleagues plus plus have started by asking a simple question: what can you buy for the equivilent of five dollars?. We've been sharing our photos online at fivedollarcomparison.org and now we invite you do to the same. It's easy - instructions for uploading your own photos are here.

The photo above? One of a kind auto-rickshaw mud flaps from our recent Ahmedabad study priced at only 250 rupees - five dollars.

And given the sensitivity of the subject matter - a reminder that all the material on Future Perfect is a personal opinion, bears no relation to actual products or services from my employer.

I've been expanding the georeferenced collection of Oakland maps that Gem and I started back in May. Recently, I purchased a 1967 Standard Oil map of Oakland for a few bucks from EBay. I was looking for late 1960's / early 1970's, because that's when the freeway structure here really started to take shape. Previously, we looked at a switch from rail to roads. Through the 50's and 60's, the switch was accelerated with the construction of massive highways through what had formerly been residential neighbhorhoods.

Particularly interesting is the Cypress Viaduct, a raised connection between highways 880, 580 and 80 running through West Oakland. When built, it was sharply criticized for splitting the neighborhood and further isolating it from downtown Oakland. The current site of the viaduct was where I made some of my first edits to OpenStreetMap. The structure was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shortly after my family moved to California, but on this map it's a fresh addition to the landscape:

The 19th anniversary of the quake was October 17th, one month ago.

The new 1967 map is a striking constrast to the previous 1952 map. The various freeways connected to Interstate 80 are one major difference, but the cartography is also a big contrast. This map is similar to the other Gousha-designed map from 1936 in its choice of bright colors, but it also features topographic shading up in the hills and orange highlights around freeway exits. A significant piece of infrastructure still under construction at this point is the 980 / 24 connector from downtown Oakland up into the hills toward the Caldecott Tunnel. The construction areas for the southern stretch are marked, while the northern route is still a whispy dotted line through miles of backyards.

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Elevation data for complete SF Bay Area.

Sitting in a café last week appreciating an hour without a set agenda and watching the Shanghai pedestrian traffic drift by. On two separate occasions women walk by with iPhone earbuds pressed into each ear whilst engaged in conversation with friends. Although it's impossible for the mere observer to know whether at that moment they were listening to music it's reasonable to assume from how the ear buds were worn, that their purpose was as a tool to project identity - "I can afford an Apple product therefore I am".

Discussions about the use of the white iPod earbuds as status symbols has been around since the iPod was first introduced (although I've been waiting for the discussion to catch up with the opposite - for some situations where iPods are already mainstream and for audio aficionados the white 'buds are considered pretty passé). It's also recognised that owning the earbuds is a shortcut into the world of everything Apple but is separate from whether you actually own an iPod - the equivalent of having a Porsche keyring but driving a Ford Mondeo. As long as you don't need to handle the device no-one is going to know whether you actually own one - which helps explain why the sales of iPod earbuds in China (reportedly) massively outstrips the sales of devices. What's intriguing about this public status-display that as white 'buds become more mainstream in China whether actual iPod owners feel the need to show or handle the actual device at critical junctures. Thought for today: the role that design e.g. carrying styles or forcing interaction can play in supporting the desire to reveal ownership and patterns of use, particularly as devices shrink and as more of the experience is wrapped up in the service offering.

The re-occurring theme form last last week was cultural interpretation. Whether, how and within what time frame Shanghai can become a global trend setter beyond its own borders. A topic for another day.

"The paper develops the questions that I posted here a while ago, focusing on how artists construct a notion of data while they use it as a creative material. It especially considers the distinction between data and information, arguing that data art often works to defer, abstract or undermine information - in the sense of a formed or contextualised message - and instead offers us a more open or underdetermined experience of the data as abstract pattern and relation. The problem here is that we can't have unmediated access to the abstract data - it's always mapped to something, structured in ways extraneous to the dataset. And data itself is always extracted, made or constructed, not some kind of autonomous digital object." (Mitchell Whitelaw)

Recharging an electric scooter in Shanghai, with power cable dangled from home window to tree to scooter. Whilst I've never come across any examples using scooters - whether, and in what contexts its OK to hi-jack someone else's power? And whether you would get away with it?

The benefits/drawbacks of a proprietary charging socket - this takes a standard Chinese 2-pin. (Sinophiles will no-doubt be spluttering into their Monday morning congee - there is of course nothing standard about Chinese power sockets). Thought for today: negative network effects such as the ease at which one can steal power.

"But there was no use of it. I wasn't using any of the technologies for anything, except for things related to the technology itself. The Semantic Web is utterly inbred in that respect. The problem is in the model, that we create this metaformat, RDF, and then the use cases will come. But they haven't, and they won't. Even the genealogy use case turned out to be based on a fallacy."

"Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."

"And just like the chess player solving a tactical puzzle, arm yourself! In chess, there are names for all of the common tactical patterns. Fork, pin, skewer. Discovered check, driving off, piling on. The list goes on a bit, but it's finite. In the same way, there is a jargon for describing code quality in much more concrete terms than the all-too-common (and uselessly vague) "bad smell". There are the basics: use meaningful names, keep it simple stupid (KISS), don't repeat yourself (DRY), be consistent, and so on. Then there are more complex quality issues like cohesion, coupling, information hiding, referential integrity and separation of concerns. Challenge yourself to use the correct terminology, both in describing problems and in suggesting improvements." (David Lowe)

"Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian's comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can't imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends - the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages - but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.... in part a simple reluctance to believe that history is about other people."

Packaging is nice enough - but more interesting this that this is offered in a cafe. In fifteen years time this'll be the social equivilent as finding a stack of sterile needles and tourniquets in your local bar.

Ghetto + Tokyo = Fail.

Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are always closely tied to labor productivity changes.

"An Information radiator is a display posted in a place where people can see it as they work or walk by. It shows readers information they care about without having to ask anyone a question. This means more communication with fewer interruptions. A good information radiator Is large and easily visible to the casual, interested observer, Is understood at a glance, changes periodically, so that it is worth visiting, is easily kept up to date."

"So the story of the manifesto is over, really. The time for marketing is past. Now what teams have to do is execute. Here, the news is not so good. A lot of teams execute poorly. Helping you avoid their fate is what this talk's about. ... Humans + running code are smarter than humans + time. ... Values: courage, ease, reactivity, naivete, visibility, joy." (Brian Marick)

"Heh heh heh, c'mon. We'd never do that, the trader started to say, but Moses was politely insistent: We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to screw me. And the salesman explained how he was going to screw him. And Moses did the trade."

"Fortunately, Bart Weetjens is here to help, and he's got lots of backup: cages filled with African giant pouched rats. The rats have an amazing sense of smell, and Weetjens has trained rats to detect landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger the mines (though they look roughly as large as my cat), but they stand on the mine and dig until a handler picks them up, rewards them with food and removes the ordnance. The rats have already cleared 416,500 square meters of minefield, and can detect more mines in an hour than a professional human deminer can in a day."

"Bezier curves are widely used in modern 2D and 3D graphics. In most applications it's quite enough to use only quadric and cubic curves. There is a huge number of explanations in the Internet about Bezier curves and I believe if you read it you know the topic. The main question is is how we can actually draw the curve. It's a common practice that the curves are approximated with a number of short line segments and it's the only efficient way to draw them. In this article I will try to explain a method of almost perfect approximation keeping the minimal number of points."

UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis: "The Google Map Image Cutter is an application designed to take any image or digital photo and cut it into tiles which are displayed on a Google Map. Using this tool, large images can be published on the web in a format that allows the user to pan and zoom using the standard Google Maps interface. Although publishing large digital photos is the most obvious application, this technique can also be used for annotated maps of an area that are not to scale e.g. directions for how to get to the office."

Tokyo ticket machine used to print out a travel card travel history. For the most part humans like the physical - even if once they have a physical copy they decide to dispose of it shortly thereafter. If you live in the city lo-fi printers are everywhere - from ticketing machines to ATM's to cash registers - and they're becoming smaller to the point of being pocketable. They're also increasingly connected - which creates a whole world of service design and billing options.

Thought for today on this balmy Tokyo Saturday morning - our ever increasing options to convert the digital to the physical.

In many cultures novice drivers are required to carry a 'learner sign' - here in Japan this extends to elderly drivers who are require to display and have the unique sticker, above.

As we slide towards 'displaying' or broadcasting digital information there is scope to display a far wider range of information. What if you knew that the driver in front hasn't had a (reported) accident in the last 40 years? Or that the vehicle in front was being driven by a teen listening to loud music? And you knew he'd just come off playing Mario Kart for the last 8 hours? Or of course that he wanted you to think that?

Waking up a midnight is a bad start to the weekend.