We're betting this is the brief for an independent landscape studio to be hosted by Studio-X NYC and led by its newly appointeddirectors, one of their night schools in which participants from diverse fields such as computer science, geography, botany, meteorology, statistics and geoinformatics meet together to sketch out an algorithm for ecological totality.
It is common today for even consumer-grade cameras to tag the images and videos that they capture with the location of the image on the earth's surface ("geolocation"). However, some imagery does not have a geolocation tag, and it can be important to know the location of the camera, image, or objects in the scene. For this imagery, analysts work hard to deduce as much as they can using reference data from many sources, including overhead and ground-based images, digital elevation data, existing well-understood image collections, surface geology, geography, and cultural information. Such image/video geolocation is an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive activity that often meets with limited success.
Several research and consumer-oriented systems have developed useful and relevant capabilities using techniques that include large-scale ground-level image acquisition, crowd sourcing, and sophisticated image matching. These largely automated systems tend to work best in geographic areas with significant population densities or that are well traveled by tourists, and where the query image or video contains notable features such as mountains or buildings.
The Finder Program aims to build on existing research systems to develop technology that augments the analyst's abilities to address the geolocation task. Required technical innovations include the 1) integration of analysts' abilities and automated geolocation technologies to solve geolocation problems, 2) fusion of diverse, publicly-available, but often imperfect data sources, and 3) expansion of automated geolocation technologies to work efficiently and accurately over all terrain and large search areas. If successful, Finder will deliver rigorously tested solutions for the image/video geolocation task of any outdoor terrestrial location.
To sign up, visit the website of who we believe to be the studio's sponsor, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an agency described as the DARPA for the intelligence community.
A speculative Ambient Minor Infrastructural Disaster Detection Network is informed by the brutal fact that cities will have to make do with the rotting infrastructure that it's got. While they wait for their tax base to recover from economic and population collapses, and the wait will be a while, their coffers will remain too paltry for major overhauls. Funds from state and federal governments will trickle down slower than molasses, that is, if there's the political will in slash-happy legislatures to dole out the necessary earmarks. Even if some budgetary miracle is divined, competing interests from every private and public sector will torpedo any hope of realization.
One component of this network, then, might be what we prefer to call as Pothole RSS, despite the absence of a web syndication. “Several cities,” writes Popular Science, “have developed apps that allow citizens to report things like downed tree branches, breaches of city ordinance, or potholes in roadways, but the city of Boston is trying to take the human out of the process. An app called Street Bump will take advantage of smartphones’ GPS data and accelerometers to automatically report potholes to city authorities without the user having to raise a finger.”
Other components are yet to be imagined. By our readers. In the comments. Thus saving us time.
For Hyperculture, Rael San Fratello Architects and Ga-Gabought a plot of land in Iowa normally cultivated for corn and by turning it into an “interface” present alternatives to the monoculture of industrial agriculture.
Using the same digital tools that produce straight rows of corn, we create an overlay of imagery organized by polyculture. These images change appearance at different “zoom”s, when viewed from above using Google Earth. At altitude +20 km, an image of a chimerical plant appears – not a logo, but a figment composed of multiple species: wild garlic, winter rye, vetch and corn. Zooming in closer to +2 km, each 40-acre parcel breaks into a more abstract pattern of diversely planted rows. Closer still, the rows are tagged with information and a photo of the crops. The Google Earth interface and earth interface unite at this moment, as satellites both direct and mediate food production.
In what sounds like a digitally ornamented CornCam or FarmVille but with a real-world terrestrial component, you control the workings of an actual field. In counter-hyperlocalism style, you program a cadre of farm machinery to till and manage a more variegated crop list using a web interface. It's agriculture informed by digital fabrication, whereby new ecological forms are printed using computer aided techniques.
Perhaps Hyperculture can be reconfigured into a social network game. The whole of Iowa is parsed into small parcels, and each one can be cultivated virtually through an interface on Facebook or with a standalone app. What gets farmed and the quality of the harvest will depend on how much “farm gold” the gamer has to spend on machinery, seeds, water and gasoline. The plot of land can turn out to be an Edenic garden, a recreation of the Dust Bowl or somewhere in between. If one tires of it, then the farm is considered abandoned and allowed to turn feral; given enough time, it might fully revert back to its pre-settlement condition. If a system error occur, nudge the resident Farmer-SysOps to reboot the gamespace.
Mrs. Blumenthal, 55, of Florida, has been driving around the city for hours now. Since landing at O'Hare, she's taken in the fleeting sights of the northern and western neighborhoods. This afternoon, she'll barrel along the inexorable super-linearity of Western Avenue all the way down to the city limit before making a U-turn and returning to her hotel for the night. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week, she'll make the same perambulations.
Meanwhile, at a cavernous control room in one of the buildings at the Illinois Medical Super-Complex, doctors and technicians have been monitoring her driving through a mesh network of surveillance cameras scoping for the early tell-tale signs of a neurodegenerative disease. Every micro murmuration, every nano-flux, every subtle correction in her navigation is being recorded. Every speed, every acceleration, every direction — indeed her every reaction to this city turned diagnostic tool will be plotted. Then her medical tour of Chicago will be data mined.
At the end of the week, she'll be given her diagnoses report, although her consultation with the doctors will be a little hurried, as the FBI will be taking over the network for their annual probe for pederastic and terrorist behaviors.
Last year, we read in Technology Review that “a prototype computer vision system can generate a live text description of what's happening in a feed from a surveillance camera. Although not yet ready for commercial use, the system demonstrates how software could make it easier to skim or search through video or image collections.”
With this image to text system, one could easily search for specific content in a video without relying on the surrounding texts, which, if they are even there to begin with, may or may not be relevant to the video. It has the potential to become a powerful forensic tool. For instance, instead of watching hours of video footage of relentlessly boring urban spectacle of a boring urban intersection to find out when a red car important to your criminal investigation might have sped through, you type in “red car” in the search field.
Perhaps an incredibly more robust system equipped with a specialized database could be used to analyze urban spaces through all hours of the day and all seasons, conceivably in a multi-year project annotating and cataloguing every mundane happenings. William H. Whyte meets Andy Warhol. Set it up overlooking a new neighborhood park, and what it spits out after two years of observation gets published in Landscape Architecture Magazine. Landscape criticism by CCTV.
Alternatively, it could be submitted to Poetry magazine. The final summary reports are written in natural language, if prosaic, but the preliminary descriptions are oddly poetic, as if written in some esoteric metric, which it might as well be to the non-computer scientist.
Land_vehicle_359 approaches intersection_0 along road_0 at 57:27. It stops at 57.29.
Land_vehicle_360 approaches intersection_0 along road_3 at 57:31.
Land_vehicle_360 moves at an above-than-normal average speed of 26.5 mph in zone_4 (approach of road_3 to intersection_0) at 57:32. It enters intersection_0 at 57:32. It leaves intersection_0 at 57:34.
There is a possible failure-to-yield violation between 57:27 to 57:36 by Land_vehicle_360.
One wonders how the lines might read for a major disaster. Or how the system might have summarized the events at an intersection in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst when a man tossed a puppy from his car.
A few years ago, in a patch of California forest, researchers were “linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers,” giving them “an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species.”
Wireless motes, cameras and other sensors track the nesting habits of birds, the life cycles of moss and the carbon dioxide uptake of various soils. Robots move along wires strung from tree to tree, lowering sensors to take temperature, humidity and light-level readings at different levels.
So when a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it. Always. In real-time. And over the internet.
If you allow us to indulge ourselves for a moment, we're reminded of that scene in Red Planet (2000) in which Val Kilmer, stranded in the extraterrestrial wilderness of Mars but incredibly near the Mars rover Sojourner, used parts of the robot to construct a makeshift radio to communicate with a fellow astronaut still in orbit. A rescue plan is hatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue robot, stumbles into a swarm of oxygen-excreting native Martian insects, and saves the Earth because of that discovery.
Stranded in the terrestrial wilderness of the forest but again incredibly near a smart patch, Val Kilmer will again cobble together a makeshift radio but this time out of dormant tiny robots to communicate with a fellow hiker still at the trailhead. A rescue team is dispatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue treebot belaying and gliding from treetop to treetop, stumbles into a swarm of climate change data saved by but not downloaded from the network, and saves the Earth because of that discovery.
Returning to the first smart forest, when it was being implanted with sensing devices, “the field [was] young.” There was “an emerging world of very large networks that combine motes and portable gear with larger technologies to improve the depth, duration and range of monitoring.”
Among these very large networks was the $200-million EarthScope, planned to comprise of “3,000 stations that are to track faint tremors, measure crustal deformation and make three-dimensional maps of the earth's interior from crust to core. Some 2,000 more instruments are to be mobile - wireless and sun- or wind-powered - and 400 devices are to move east in a wave from California across the nation over the course of a decade.”
Another one is the $500-million National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, which then envisioned to include “15 circular areas 250 miles in diameter, each including urban, suburban, agricultural, managed and wild lands.”
Each observatory would have radar for tracking birds and weather as well as many layers of motes and robots and sensors, including some on cranes in forest canopies. If NEON gets a green light, construction is expected to start in 2007 and last five years.
One goal is to track invasive species, which cause more than $100 billion in agricultural losses each year. Another is to forecast changes in the biosphere that may accompany climate shifts so planners and government officials can make better choices about land use and restoration.
One wonders to what extent these networks were implemented over the years. How much of the $1 billion the National Science Foundation saw itself spending on these ecological projects did it actually dole out? Are there now, together with Charlie Sheen's global-spanning blanket of missives, layers upon layers of eco-data giving us a totalizing view of the entire planet?
Among the directives outlined in China's new five-year defense plan is the creation of a smart dust surveillance network. This will be comprised of speckle-sized devices that can sense environmental conditions, such as light, temperature and humidity. More importantly, they can gather civilian and military intelligence. Their tiny dimensions mean they are difficult to detect and can squeeze through the narrowest of gaps in doors and walls. They can communicate with each other wirelessly, as well as transmit data to a nearby command center or remote satellite.
Dust, already pervasive and a nuisance to allergy sufferers and the obsessive compulsive, will become even more intrusive, as invasive as sand in your crotch. They'll gather on tables and floors, collect in corners or in your hair, where they'll rest silently listening for aberrant civility. In such a domestic space relinquished to the state, dusting, vacuuming and other quotidian chores turn into political acts of subversion.
Meanwhile, for cross-border espionage, artificial weather stations in the Gobi Desert will churn and whirl up massive dust storms. It'll simply be a matter of turning on the spigot. Hit the switch, and the earth will reach out with vaporous tendrils. When these have nicely thickened, a liberal sprinkling of smart dusts will be added to create a heady stew, which in a day or two will paint vermillion skies over Beijing before crossing the seas and choking the cities of the Koreas, Japan and, much further afield, the Pacific coast of the United States.
Specifically, Greek swimming pools. We are always reminded of them now whenever we hear news of the financial crisis plaguing Eurozone member countries. Every time, without exception, news of property market bubbles, sovereign debt, IMF bailouts, governments collapsing and violent street protests, including pipe bombs set off by domestic anarchists, not only from Greece but also from Ireland, Portugal and Spain — they inevitably conjure up Suprematist images of shimmering Aegean exclaves.
This is because, as reported by Spiegel last year, Greece has been using creative ways to boost tax revenues and lessen the country's crippling government deficit. These include using Google Earth to find the swimming pools of tax cheats.
Using police helicopters, Greece's financial crimes squad “fly over Athens' affluent suburbs and make films of homes owned by doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They use satellite pictures by Google Earth to locate country villas, swimming pools and properties. And these tactics have revealed that the suburbs didn't have 324 swimming pools, as was reported, but rather 16,974.”
...which can abruptly make a detour to George Clooney...
If you haven't already heard, the Hollywood superstar contracted malaria while on a trip to Sudan earlier this month. He was there to observe the voting for independence in Southern Sudan and to draw attention to any humanitarian abuses that might arise during and after the referendum. He has since been cured.
No doubt a far less physically taxing way to draw attention to any conflict is through another George Clooney initiative: the Satellite Sentinel project.
A collaboration between Google, the UNITAROperational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), Harvard University and celebrity-backed NGOs, the project hires private satellites to monitor signs on the ground that could indicate impending violence, such as troop buildup and movements. The images gathered by the satellites are being made public to let would-be aggressors know that the world is watching them.
“We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,” says Clooney.
...and further deviate halfway around the world to the Amazon rainforests...
Last year we read about the efforts of the Surui Indians in Brazil to protect their land reservation. “Almost three times the size of New York City,” their patch of the Amazon rainforest is constantly threatened by farmers, loggers, ranchers and gold miners from all sides. They've lost some of their forest to deforestation, but managed to save the rest.
In order to protect what's left, they've teamed up with Google to capture high resolution satellite images to better spot illegal activities on their land. Every inch of their forest will be mapped and displayed on Google Earth.
...before getting to the topic at hand: food.
Tax collectors, tech-savvy indigenous tribes and George Clooney aren't the only ones using remote sensing and GIS applications to monitor and catch acts of criminality. There are also the crop cops at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Aerial Photography Field Office.
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We mentioned this program, called the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), a couple of years ago when food prices were at record levels. Because farmers could earn more money by growing cash crops, they started converting the protective greenbelts back into croplands. In the fall of 2007, according to The New York Times, farmers “took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.”
Then came the global financial crisis of 2008, and food prices declined. But that decline, reportsGuernica, “seems to have been an anomaly.”
The December 2010 index of global food prices compiled by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) hit a record 215, one point higher than in the spring of 2008. In fact, some food products, including sugar, cooking oils, and fats, are now trading substantially above their 2008 levels; others, including dairy products, grains, and meat, are inching perilously close to record levels.
So we'll we see more conversion of greenbelts into croplands? And will there be that one farmer who's going to keep their plump subsidies, courtesy of foreclosed and unemployed taxpayers, while plowing yet even more riches from destroyed wildlife habitats?
But what's a post without a (regurgitated) proposal: The Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation.
The problem with the National Agriculture Imagery Program is that there's just too many farms and too few analysts. Actually, we don't know if there are in fact too few analysts to pore through all those maps. It may be that just one cartographer is that's needed to comb through all the maps of Kansas and can do it in a couple of days.
But why not crowdsource it? Why not release the maps (that is, wikileak them, as they aren't in the public domain due to privacy matters) to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas?
It'd be like Einstein@home, a citizen science project which last year discovered a “disrupted binary pulsar” that may be the fastest-spinning of its kind. But instead of surveying the universe for distant remnants of supernovas, the teeming Web 3.0 masses use their collective clicking power to survey much nearer terrains. Imagine thousands of Google Earth addicts as citizen crop cops panning through digital screens in search of horticultural counterfeits, hours on end trying to spot cornfields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment — and enjoying the outdoors.
In trying to absolve themselves of their litany of environmental sins, some golf courses have started using treated effluent water to maintain their unnatural lushness.
According to The New York Times, “Golf courses are all but weaned from municipal fresh-water systems, with 86 percent now using some other source, like recycled effluent water, surface water or water treated by reverse osmosis. Significantly, 70 percent of [golf club] superintendents surveyed said they were keeping their turf drier.”
Additionally, those that can afford it have been experimenting with “subterranean wireless sensors” to better manage and monitor their water use. In terms of water conservation, they're turning out to be quite a success. One club superintendent is quoted as saying that they have cut the amount of water they use in half.
The implication here, of course, is that giving high-tech intelligence to other landscapes — to athletic fields, farms, parks and home gardens — could mean a reduction in resource consumption there as well.
Now if only some of these golf clubs try to absolve themselves of their racist, sexist and other socio-exclusionary policies.
PROPOSAL: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensingsystem to predict and detect forest wildfires.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #1: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a remote arboreal border homeland security system.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #3: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power concealed speakers sculpting the extinct sonic landscapes of a former ecosystem.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #4: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power mobile telecommunication devices long enough for passing hikers, park rangers and loggers to send a couple of tweets.
COUNTERPROPOSAL #5: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power fog machines which can be used, depending on your artistic persuasion, to render non-classically the very much classical scene of an aerosolized Jupiter raping Io, or equally classical scenes of wars and heroes, for instance, napalm defoliation during the Vietnam War.
If blanketing UK cities with a thick scopic fog of CCTV cameras weren't enough, the countryside may soon find itself placed under similar heavy surveillance. But this, curiously enough, might be a good thing.
As reported by BBC News last month, researchers from technology firm QinetiQ and from Aberystwyth University flew an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “over fields in England and Wales to map the nitrogen levels in soil, to determine whether fertiliser applications were needed.”
The data collected was then used to create a Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map, which “tells you the difference between 'green crops' that are photosynthesising and bare ground.” Where there is bare ground, more fertilizer may be needed.
Equipped with this NDVI map, some GPS locators and a techno-pimped out John Deere, farmers would thus be able to target areas in need of supplemental nutrients and to better estimate how much to use, potentially releasing less fertilizers that otherwise would leach out and pollute water sources down the hydrological line. This is precision farming.
Of course, you can use the same information-gathering technique to monitor other environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, disease outbreaks and pest population.
The ecological impact is potentially huge. Imagine only watering crops that need to be watered (and only when required) instead of flooding the entire field. Imagine as well spraying just those diseased plants with herbicides (and only when there is an outbreak) instead of suffocating acres and acres of fields with poison all the time. Better yet, you send in a cadre of Medusa agrobots networked to GPS satellites to surgically excise these botanical tumors.
With a surveillance network such as this, one wonders if you can re-purpose it to monitor other things, say, the urban poor doing a bit of nighttime grocery shopping while the food crisis and subprime armageddon rage on in the inner cities. When detected, they get sprayed with herbicides.
How about GMO crops? Design these neo-plants to emit a characteristic glow in the infrared or ultraviolet wavelength, and you can be alerted when they've jumped the fence. And don't forget to allocate part of the network to keep a look out for anti-GMO anarchists.
It's entirely possible that future pharms will be as heavily monitored as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and as maniacally firewalled as CIA servers.
Meanwhile, how about using a similar surveillance network to monitor acts of agro-criminality?
As food prices have soared in recent months, farmers in the UK and in the U.S. have started to abandon conservation programs. Through these programs, farmers receive government subsidies for letting some of their fields lay fallow, but not as much if they were to now grow cash crops like wheat, soybeans and corn. Consequently, many of these uncultivated croplands, which have greatly helped restore wildlife habitats and reverse topsoil erosion, are being farmed once again.
Farmers are required to notify the government when they opt out of these programs. But do they really? Could they not be alerting the local agriculture bureau in order to keep their subsidies?
Specially in the U.S., it's rather difficult to tell if a farmer is being honest or not. There is just too much land. To make it easier to detect promises kept and promises broken, the U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP).
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America. The program is intended to make sure farmers are doing what's required to earn their government subsidies.
It's an enormous task, keeping track of those subsidies. They add up to billions of dollars each year and they go to more than half a million farmers, scattered from Maine to California. Some farmers receive payments for protecting streams and wetlands; others, for growing specific crops. In each case, the payments depend on accurate information on the amount of land involved. So the USDA has resorted to a program of overhead reconnaissance — something akin of spy flights.
We are told that the maps generated from these overhead reconnaissances aren't released to the public, as doing so might violate the farmers' privacy. But imagine releasing them to the internet wilderness of distributed grid computing, data pornographers, meme-hungry social networking sites, open source virtuality and web-savvy eco-guerrillas.
It'd be like Stardust@home or SETI@home, except you're asking the teeming Web 2.0 masses to look for terrestrial counterfeit. Instead of surveying the Martian landscapes for uncatalogued craters and landforms, citizen agro-agents will survey nearer terrains in search of horticultural deviants, the tenuous peace between the urban and the rural be damned.
Persuade Wired, Boing Boing, Engadget, Slashdot and even Land8Lounge to blog about this, and you could have an army of volunteers comparing maps for hours on end, late into the night, during lunchbreaks or boring studio lectures to spot planted fields where there should be reconstructed prairie or wetlands. This may even be the only time they get to interface with that other wilderness beyond the urban periphery — with Nature — for an extended amount of time.
Protecting your tax dollars while saving the environment and enjoying the outdoors.
But will England's green and pleasant land become an aviary of sorts for pilotless airplanes (how about solar powered mini-dirigibles?), whose droning bird songs in B-flat will commingle with the melodic twittering of traditional birds, the hypnotic chirping of crickets and the nostalgic rustling of grains against the wind? “Ah, the sounds of summer,” passing urbanites will plaintively sigh.
Will America's majestic horizons darken with a murmuring data cloud kicking up a neverending electromagnetic storm?
POSTSCRIPT #1:Boing Boing picked up our post on Agro-veillance, and the comments there are worth a read. They form a dialogue that a lot of blogs long for.
Could our house plants someday tell us just how much we suck at being a parent?
Adrià Bassaganyes and Ben Salem, of Eindhoven University of Technology, in co-operation with Singapore National University’s Mixed Reality Lab, are exploring that possibility — and more — with their investigative project called Ambient Biomedia.
Quoting a quote published in a recent post in Next Nature:
Ambient Biomedia is an investigative project about using living beings, in particular plants, to display human lifestyle problems information. The working principle of our systems is taking data about the lifestyle aspect that the user wants to monitor, such as time spent with somebody, health aspects or bad habits, and semantically couple it into an aspect of a living being. The user would merge the plant with his daily environment, following the evolution of his problem’s state in a non intrusive way. Thanks to the empathical link existing between human and other living beings, the user would see himself reflected on the plant, feeling sorry for herself, meditating about his problem and hopefully, taking measures to solve it.
In other words, cropping up soon all over the place will be gardens that can diagnose a whole range of existing medical and psychosocial problems and which actually then become part of a prescribed therapeutic regimen.
Indeed, the data-gathering component of this ambient system is quite feasible in light of the following two research projects.
1) The first project was the subject of a post we wrote last summer and involves the development of an early detection system for Alzheimer's disease. In that project, a house was rigged with motion detectors to monitor changes, however imperceptibly small and wildly erratic, in the day-to-day activity of its elderly volunteer.
The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.
Spot the tiny wobbles and wiggles and you can spot the disease early.
2) The second one we read about in an article published last year in The Economist. There, we learned that Yoshiharu Yamamoto, of the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have discovered that “depressed people move in a mathematically different way from other people.”
In their experiment, the researchers monitored changes in the daily movement of those that were diagnosed with clinical depression and those that were healthy. To no one's surprise, they observed a difference in activity between the two experimental groups. When they plotted their data out on graphs, however, they were surprised to see the results feature the characteristic curve of a power law distribution.
The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.
Spot the tell-tale curvature and you can spot the disease, the research suggests.
Gathering actuatable data of any aspects of lifestyle, then, seems to be just a matter of building an in-house or external surveillance system using GIS, CCTV, remote sensing, complex algorithms, motion-activated laser beams and other cool toys mostly geared for the security industry.
So the next question is: how will all those data get manifested in plants? This, too, has been explored before, for instance, in an art installation called Spore 1.1.
But despite all these real-world examples suggesting plausibility, a working ambient system might not ever be successfully produced. But no matter, we still want to know what landscape architects will do with it.
Will landscape architects, for instance, march up to the Department of Children and Family Services with the designs for a garden that can actuate the abusive behavior of foster parents towards kids placed under their ward so that underpaid, overworked and overstretched case workers need only to drive by their houses for an evaluation? If the lawn is green or the rose bushes are lusciously flowering, then all is well inside, physically and psychologically. But if the verdancy of the hedges doesn't quite meet visual standards, then a home inspection is warranted? The suburban landscape vernacular as a measuring stick of domestic and social harmony — which, of course, isn't unheard of.
Will they instead design neighborhood parks finely attuned to the pederastic behaviors of unregistered sex offenders in the area, orchestrating a genetically-encoded series of seismonastic movements when one is detected?
Will they file patents on a rose hybrid that can actuate how much sex you're getting? If it desiccates when you're not having any, what will you do about it?
Finding that the “empathical link existing between human and other living beings” cannot be reliably counted on to spur people to take corrective measures, will they then commission the services of genetic engineers to enable the plants to produce an antidote in pollen form and to release it when needed whether one wants to be cured or not?
In a very recent post, I started talking about a Swiss company's snow avalanche life-jacket and then somehow ended up writing a drive-by-proposal for a migratory spa town, which the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan would set up during a wildfire event in southern California in the hopes of attaining — in the middle of a coronal maelstrom — psychic rejuvenation within its protective walls, because rehab centers, county jail cells, Starbucks and other celebrity landscape du jour have earlier failed to give them what it is that they seem to always be photographed seeking.
I then stated briefly that through their insulated windows they would be privy to “a cinematic struggle better than what is shown at a theater on Hollywood Boulevard.” Or an analogue surface of the sun.
A few days hence, I discovered some photographs from the United States Geological Survey that might as well have been taken from these imagined mobile therapeutic chambers.
To be more accurate, these sublime scenes of wildlife escaping the fires and then returning to a devastated landscape were captured “using a 'camera trap,' a camera wired with motion sensors to automatically take photos when the sensors detect movement in the camera’s field of view.”
Quoting further:
This camera trap is on the former El Toro Marine Base, an area that burned last week in the Orange County Santiago Fire. This particular area was the southernmost extension of the fire, where it crossed over a toll road into this small peninsula of habitat surrounded on the other three sides by urban development, small agricultural fields and the main part of the former Marine Base.
It's yet another extensive surveillance system, one that monitors, in this case, “elusive, often-nocturnal animals” as they inhabit a “complex landscape of open spaces, roads and urban areas.” In other words, it isn't too dissimilar from the one stalking the streets of Los Angeles.
“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.
And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.
Which, of course, isn't exactly true.
This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”
Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.
Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.
Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?
And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.
During brief lulls in CNN's wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, we try imagining the complex of rooms from where the Super-Versailles might be monitored and controlled in real-time.
Could they be cavernous, hermetically sealed, climate controlled, an ambience of hard drives whirring and clicking, the smells of days-old coffee and hot rubberized circuitry mixing with endlessly recycled, zealously filtered air, entombed inside a mountain?
Or the opposite of everything imagined above?
Thankfully, the wonderful, if unfortunately non-English, blog Approximation points us to Barco, a Belgian company which specializes in designing and developing solutions for large-screen visualization. A leader in professional markets, so we are told, they have equipped the control rooms of NASA, traffic management centers, national power grids, broadcast studios and military combat rooms. They also outfitted the FIFA World Cup international media center, which served an audience numbering in the billions.
And they even supplied the LED technology for Millennium Park's Crown Fountain.
So from multiple case studies found on their website, it becomes easier to visualize the control room of our very own Super-Versailles. Wall-to-wall cinematics, endless streams of numbers, thousands of hours of hydrological voyeurism saved for the archives or for later viewing and efficiency analysis. Beyond what Warhol ever imagined. In fact, Barco may have one-upped him, John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Alfred Hitchcock.
And among all the trillions of electrified pixels, a lone landscape architect — perhaps he's a descendant of Arnold de Ville or Harold N. Fisk, but definitely has watched Dr. Strangelove and TheMatrixReloaded one too many times — meticulously tracks the migration of a single water molecule: from that first dangling raindrop from a Category 5 hurricane all the way to its first contact with the earth, and then through its frothy journey from rivulets to streams to rivers to cataracts to reservoirs to the fountains of Rome.
Because he has to; the Super-Versailles must follow the script absolutely.
Of course, since he reads too much BLDGBLOG, he'll program scenarios of miniscule critical systems failures. For fun, he'll flood a street or two; drain the Trevi Fountain for a day just to piss off tired, sweaty tourists; and trap honeymooning couples on a Disney cruise ship in the Panama Canal. Mildly inconsequential events of topographical hysterics to pass the hours away.
From the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, a scene from a “camouflage class in New York University, where men and women are preparing for jobs in the Army or in industry.” The assignments sound rather intensive: “make models from aerial photographs, re-photograph them, then work out a camouflage scheme and make a final photograph.”
But what would happen if you repeat the same process, only this time you make the model not from aerial photographs but from that final photograph of the camouflage scheme? And the same process gets repeated again. And again and again. Over and over until you've produced a township of simulated simulacra, a camouflage of a camouflage of a camouflage that actually gets built.
Simon Norfolk's thesis is straightforward: landscape is a function of war.
In parts of London, for instance, “the Roman stones are still buried beneath the modern tarmac. Crucially, it needs to be understood that the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter - a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army that could move quickly and safely along these paved, all-weather roads. It is extraordinary that London, a city that ought to be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers and modern international Finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.”
So not by island-making tectonics, alluvial scouring, gravitational erosion, photosynthesis, or even supernatural wizardry.
It's no surprise then that Simon Norfolk went on an enviable trip to Ascension in the South Atlantic.
Where it seems that the paradisical-sounding island is not simply an occasional lithic extension of the Earth but a gigantic surveillance machine: a weaponized island. Hardwared and networked into the global ECHELON infrastructure to eavesdrop on each and every communication of each and every person on the planet. What is spoken in the caves of Afghanistan is readily picked up in Ascension.
Certainly for some, a manufactured Fantasy Island.
I'm certainly left to wonder: which came first — the island or ECHELON?
It seems that a fake rock, The New York Timesreports, may briefly reignite the Cold War between Russia and the UK: “A grainy black-and-white video, broadcast on state television on Sunday night and shown repeatedly again on Monday, was said to show a British diplomat picking up a fake rock that was said to conceal a communications device used to download and transmit classified information through hand-held computers.”
Placed near a leafless tree to add, I suppose, more naturalism to an otherwise fabricated still life, “the rock, the size of a watermelon, and the device, said to be able to transmit and receive data at distances of more than 60 feet, were seized near Moscow, prompting a search across the city for similar device.”
One has to wonder how many other rocks and stones and boulders were overturned, inspected and shaken, provoking perhaps mildly amusing Heidegger meets Monty Phyton soliloquies: “Is this fake? Hello? Is this thing on?” (In Russian.)
Or how many deciduouses and evergreens were stripped and frisked. Knowing how trees can be great masters at disguise, I imagine this militarized tree hugging love fest may have played out on an unprecedented scale.
Perhaps in a decade or so, we will be told that the entire Yellowstone National Park has been the real ECHELON listening post all along.
iSee is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. With iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras (“paths of least surveillance”) allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being “caught on tape” by unregulated security monitors.
Mrs. Blumenthal, 55, of Florida, has been driving around the city for hours now. Since landing at O'Hare, she's taken in the fleeting sights of the northern and western neighborhoods. This afternoon, she'll barrel along the inexorable super-linearity of Western Avenue all the way down to the city limit before making a U-turn and returning to her hotel for the night. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week, she'll make the same perambulations.
