Posts tagged infrastructure

Once there was a fox that wanted to eat a turtle, but whenever he tried to, it withdrew into its shell. He bit it and he shook it, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. One day he had an idea: he made the turtle an offer to buy its shell. But the turtle was clever and knew it would be eaten without this protection, so it refused. Time passed, until one day there appeared a television hanging in a tree, displaying images of flocks of happy, naked turtles – flying! The turtle was amazed. Oh! They can fly! But wouldn’t it be dangerous to give up your shell? Hark, the voice on television was announcing that the fox had become a vegetarian. “If I could only take off my shell, my life would be so much easier,” thought the turtle. “If the turtle would only give up its shell, it would be so much easier to eat,” thought the fox – and paid for more broadcasts advertising flying turtles. One morning, when the sky seemed bigger and brighter than usual, the turtle removed its shell. What it fatally failed to understand was that the aim of information warfare is to induce an adversary to let down its guard. (In 1998, Sergei P Rastorguev, a Russian military analyst, published Philosophy of Information Warfare, which included a lengthy version of this anecdote)

via https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/02/fake-news-botnets-how-russia-weaponised-the-web-cyber-attack-estonia

“Yet all of this, as powerful as it is, remains secondary to the everyday experience of living in our cities. Art lags behind, unable to capture the visceral quotidian experience of Uber, TaskRabbit, Snapchat, Giphy, Pokémon Go (which has already Been and Pokémon Gone), Helsinki’s autonomous shuttles and Singapore’s self-driving taxis, Japanese sushi-delivery robots and Domino’s Pizza delivery drones, American security-guard robots upended in shopping-mall fountains, South Korean robotic mannequins, ‘conversations’ with AI personal assistants over email, shouting at Amazon Alexa, ‘holographic’ assistants at airports, Microsoft chatbots becoming racist and genocidal on Twitter, Chinese chatbots vanishing after spurning the Communist Party, 4Chan, 3D printed handguns and Google Tango phones 3D-mapping spaces, Russian election-hacking multiplied by Cambridge Analytica and the Macedonian Fake-News Complex, Icelandic crowdsourced constitutions, Dutch police training eagles to take down illegal drones, Bitcoin hard forks, Ethereum hacks … In other words, a quick flick across the home page of The Verge or TechCrunch. Art in general has not found a foothold in these new times.”

–Dan Hill

If you thought seat licenses were lucrative in the 1990s, wait until its city blocks in the 2020s. All are becoming increasingly embedded in physical systems, supply chains, mobility platforms and the architecture of data that makes these and other elements of the real world. One had only to notice how many seemingly incidental displays were malfunctioning in and around mass transit systems during the recent WannaCry ransomware outbreak to get a sense of where these companies systems are entwined with delivery of public conveniences. AWS, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook Messenger are now the mission critical sinews of the modern world. But you knew this.

via https://medium.com/phase-change/newsletter–29-sci-fi-economics–4a22d590d55f

As we progress to a point where fewer people are needed to pilot vehicles, and more roads become “robot readable,” we will inevitably see new uses being found for roads, and road infrastructure changing to optimize for machine, not human, legibility and use. Given the substantial role human roads play in shaping our social and commercial environments, like rivers and rails before them, streets, buildings, and towns and cities will gradually reshape to reflect machine uses.

via https://medium.com/phase-change/things-find-their-own-uses-for-streets–1913316e2e1e

Welcome to DP World London Gateway, the latest international trophy of the oil-rich emirate of Dubai, and one of the biggest privately funded infrastructure projects the UK has ever seen. It is a gargantuan undertaking (on the scale of Crossrail, Terminal 5 or HS2) that’s projected to have a bigger economic impact than the Olympics – but you might not even know it was happening. The port has been up and running for almost two years, with two of its six berths now complete and a third well on the way. But, unlike the daily controversy of runways and commuter trains, the cumbersome business of how 90% of our goods reach us from all over the world doesn’t tend to impinge on the public psyche. Satnav certainly hasn’t caught up. As we drive out to the sprawling sandy landscape, the blue dot floats out into the Thames, from whose depths this new quayside has been summoned. Over 30 million tonnes of silt was dredged to make this artificial land mass, which extends 400m beyond the original shoreline, a process that saw the largest migration of animals in Europe – with 320,000 newts, water voles and adders relocated to a new nature reserve nearby. The sheer scale is impossible to comprehend from the ground: the facility is twice the size of the City of London.

via https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/15/london-gateway-megaport-you-didnt-know-existed-docks#img–3

All Roads Lead to Rome.

Rudimentary stepwells first appeared in India between the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D., born of necessity in a capricious climate zone bone-dry for much of the year followed by torrential monsoon rains for many weeks. It was essential to guarantee a year-round water-supply for drinking, bathing, irrigation and washing, particularly in the arid states of Gujarat (where they’re called vavs) and Rajasthan (where they’re baoli, baori, or bawdi) where the water table could be inconveniently buried ten-stories or more underground. Over the centuries, stepwell construction evolved so that by the 11th century they were astoundingly complex feats of engineering, architecture, and art.

http://www.archdaily.com/395363/india-s-forgotten-stepwells

The speed and scale of China’s island-building spree have alarmed other countries with interests in the region. China announced in June that the creation of islands — moving sediment from the seafloor to a reef — would soon be completed. “The announcement marks a change in diplomatic tone, and indicates that China has reached its scheduled completion on several land reclamation projects and is now moving into the construction phase,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group. So far China has built port facilities, military buildings and an airstrip on the islands. The installations bolster China’s foothold in the Spratly Islands, a disputed scattering of reefs and islands in the South China Sea more than 500 miles from the Chinese mainland.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/what-china-has-been-building-in-the-south-china-sea.html?_r=0

In the simple ritual of making tea, I have already marshalled two vast technological systems which exist only to fulfil my desires - and that’s without thinking about the convoluted global supply chain through which I acquired the tea (which involves not only the agricultural systems used to grow and prepare the tea leaves, but also the packing, distribution and stock management systems used to get the tea from where it was grown to where it will be consumed, and the global markets of trade and finance through which its ownership and value must pass), or where the fuel for some of those power stations might have originally come from. I have accomplished all this with a few movements and gestures, so simple and untaxing that they can reproduce themselves almost unbidden through even the fiercest of hangovers.

http://futureeverything.org/news/infrastructure-cyborgs-part-one/

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In an era of breathtaking, earth-changing engineering projects, this has been billed as the biggest of them all. Three times as long and almost twice as deep as its rival in Panama, Nicaragua’s channel will require the removal of more than 4.5bn cubic metres of earth – enough to bury the entire island of Manhattan up to the 21st floor of the Empire State Building. It will also swamp the economy, society and environment of one of Latin America’s poorest and most sparsely populated countries. Senior officials compare the scale of change to that brought by the arrival of the first colonisers.

“It’s like when the Spanish came here, they brought a new culture. The same is coming with the canal,” said Manuel Coronel Kautz, the garrulous head of the canal authority. “It is very difficult to see what will happen later – just as it was difficult for the indigenous people to imagine what would happen when they saw the first [European] boats.”

For the native Americans, of course, that first glimpse of Spanish caravels was the beginning of an apocalypse. Columbus’s ships were soon followed by waves of conquistadores whose feuding, disease and hunger for gold and slaves led to the annihilation of many indigenous populations.

–http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/-sp-nicaragua-canal-land-opportunity-fear-route

For now, however, it is only the village of Löwenstedt that has succeeded in mobilising the solidarity of its inhabitants to build a high-speed Internet network. Other villages have been slower and found it more difficult to follow Löwenstedt’s lead. “At least 68 percent of households in a village have to promise to subscribe to the fibre-optic network before we start work,” said BBNG chief Ute Gabriel-Boucsein.

http://www.thelocal.de/20140601/german-villagers-build-own-broadband-network

While the bleeding process is clearly better for the crabs than the outright harvesting that used to occur, the study shows that there’s no such thing as free horseshoe crab blood.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/

Im zukünftigen Energiesystem werden die Stromverteilnetze eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Wenn der Umstieg auf Erneuerbare Energien gelingen soll, muss das Berliner Stromnetz schon heute darauf ausgerichtet werden. Außerdem erwirtschaften Stromnetze Millionengewinne. Diese sollen der Energiewende und den Bürgern zugute kommen und in der Region wirksam werden. Berlin gewinnt mit dem Stromnetz in Bürgerhand eine wertvolle Anlage der Daseinsvorsorge und der regionalen Wertschöpfung. Mit dem Kauf unseres Stromnetzes treiben wir die Demokratisierung der Energielandschaft voran, damit wir Bürgerinnen und Bürger über die zukünftige Energieversorgung mitentscheiden können.

http://www.buerger-energie-berlin.de/faq

Although I am truly fascinated by what sorts of optical landmarks might yet be developed for field-testing the optical capabilities of drones, as if the world might soon be peppered with opthalmic infrastructure for self-training autonomous machines, it is also quite intriguing to realize that these calibration targets are, in effect, ruins, obsolete sensory hold-overs from an earlier age of film-based cameras and less-powerful lenses. Calibrating nothing, they are now just curious emblems of a previous generation of surveillance technology, robot-readable hieroglyphs whose machines have all moved on.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/optical-calibration-targets.html