Archive for the 'general' Category
Local controversies around particular proposals from Mayor Bloomberg’s new long-term plan for New York City have emerged recently, ranging from congestion pricing to zoning, and others. These proposals would entail immediate local repercussions if enacted and, therefore, should obviously be of concern to residents and other local stakeholders. However, what I think has been missing [...]
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ubiquitous calculation
Via The End of Cyberspace:
Nigel Thrift, “Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness,” Economy and Society 33:4 (November 2004): 582-604. [pdf]
Thrift:
… in recent years the activity of calculation has become so ubiquitous that it has entered a new space, which I call ‘qualculation’, an activity arising [...]
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mobile phones in Kenya
Last week’s The Economist had an excellent article offering a bird’s-eye view of current development trends in Kenya. Among these trends, I wanted to emphasize two of them here.
First, the growing pervasiveness of mobile phones in Kenya, how this is helping the efficiency of local farmers, and how this is occurring largely despite of, rather [...]
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Last Sunday I attended a panel titled ‘Navigating Urban Flows’ at Cooper Union, part of a weekend conference organized by Creative Time and inSite. My main reason for attending was to hear Saskia Sassen, one of my favorite authors on the research frontiers of globalization, digital networks, and urban theory.
Among other things, Professor Sassen [...]
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comScore posted a press release today claiming that mobile Internet user numbers are already at one-fifth of PC-based users in the UK and US. The specific numbers for the UK are 5.7 million mobile web users compared to 30 million PC-based users; in the US, 30 million mobile web users compared to 159 million PC-based [...]
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Last Monday I attended a lecture by Everyware author Adam Greenfield on the social implications of the growing dissolving of networked computing into the urban landscape and the individual; some people are calling this ‘ubiquitous computing’, ‘ambient informatics’, and other terms.
I find this whole field of ubiquitous computing extremely interesting and hearing Greenfield’s lecture reacquainted [...]
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Scanning through material for a conference paper proposal I came across a paper by Saskia Sassen on The Impact of the Internet on Sovereignty: Unfounded and Real Worries.
Sassen argues that digital space is actually composed of both private and public digital networks, the latter then encompassing what we know as the Internet. Contrary to popular [...]
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For a course last semester I wrote a (very) brief paper on DRM technologies and what I perceive as the emergence of technology-enabled private authority (TEPA) in cyberspace of a simultaneously multi and non-territorial character.
Regarding DRM, I write:
“From the publishers of digital intellectual property has risen a new need for the protection of their rights [...]
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Lessig’s Code and Architecture
So, I came home to sunny, beach-infected Puerto Rico for a few days and what better to do here than stay cocooned reading Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0. His main argument seems to be that regulation depends on the specific configuration of codes underlying the varying architectures in cyberspace or, as a co-founder of the EFF’s [...]
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I am a doctoral student of Global Affairs at Rutgers University. The graduate program is highly interdisciplinary and inviting of new subject-areas which affect or are affected by world social dynamics. While my fellow students focus on sexuality, environmental politics, economic development in Africa, and other issues, I am slowly developing a keen interest for [...]
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