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Time to hit the streetsTime to hit the streetsTime to hit the streets 04/09/2004 04:05 PM It's time to take to the streets and fight. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Time to hit the streetsGrok Headline matches for Time to hit the streetsTaking Wi-Fi to the StreetsTaking Wi-Fi to the Streets 12/11/2003 02:33 PM You know Wi-Fi has really hit the mainstream when art students use it in their performance art pieces: Students from New York's Parsons Design and Technology have built access points into bicycles and will use them to send emails from New York subways. The architects of this idea seem a bit torn between regarding it as performance art and pointing to its utility. There's not a very detailed techincal explanation for how this works, but it appears that the APs use cell networks for backhaul or are used as repeaters to extend signals from other hotspots. It's kind of a cool idea for delivering Wi-Fi connections on short notice or for a temporary reason. Or, wouldn't it just be cool to have so that you could be sure of having a connection--and be able to share it with pals--anywhere?... Wi-Fi from London StreetsWi-Fi from London Streets 12/20/2003 08:35 PM StreetNet Islington, London MMORPGs take to the streetsMMORPGs take to the streets 04/06/2005 05:59 PM One recent trend in the online gaming market has been towards mobile phones. Though we are moving into an era where people can potentially walk around with a networked game console in their hand, current mobile game development still lacks many of the resources that traditional gaming platforms offer, leaving gamers speculating about the prospect of additional mobile MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing games). "As the phones get better and better, they could host games onto themselves, but largely at this stage, they would need to be more casual, simple titles," MMORPG.com's Lead Content Editor Dana Massey told Spymac. "One problem with MMOs is that they are large and complex beasts, which is not very well suited to the often-simplistic interfaces that you find typically on a cell phone. That is not to say a new design suited to cell phones will not come along. I am certain many folks are working on it as we speak." There have been a few massive multiplayer mobile games offered in the past but mobile gaming is now blossoming with large manufacturers like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, and Motorola improving the gaming performance of their phones, and adopting open platforms as their mobile OS to support multiple mobile gaming services. Nokia in March announced the development of a new PC-mobile phone cross-platform MMORPG, HinterWars: The Aterian Invasion. Created by Nokia for promotion in the Asia-Pacific region, the game allows the user to play along with thousands of others using the Nokia N-Gage gamedeck or computer. The game expected to be available for download free of charge in the fourth quarter of 2005. “HinterWars represents an all-new gaming concept that for the first time brings together the two most popular gaming platforms – the mobile phone and the PC,” Nokia Multimedia's Rick Gawdat said. "What’s even more appealing is the true mobility that HinterWars offers gamers. When they’re at home or not on the move, they can play HinterWars on their PCs, but when they’re out, or traveling in the bus, train or taxi, they can continue playing the game on their N-Gage gamedeck.” We can expect to see this trend towards mobile gaming continuing, following the increasing interest in MMORPGs. Because MMORPGs are often, to some extent, competitive, people often feel the pressure to play as much as possible, leaving the mobile phone a great target for on-the-go game play. "I could easily foresee game designs that encourage people to log in for short bursts throughout the day to keep on top of things," Massey said. "There would be no better way to do this than via cell phone." Pacman on the StreetsPacman on the Streets 05/06/2004 01:38 AM I must play this before I die. I think I'd rather act out Defender or SimCity. PacManhattan unleashes the old arcade game
on the streets of New
York. Students from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications program
marked out some city streets, donned costumes of game entities, and
played out. From the Screen to the StreetsFrom the Screen to the Streets 10/29/2003 08:15 PM Aggregators of blog postings—which rank blog listings by popularity, similar to Google’s page rank technology—already serve as a filter for this flood of ... Taking it to the StreetsTaking it to the Streets 07/20/2004 09:29 PM
I'm starting to like these Salon articles on social networking. They're well researched, written and informative. What a concept - no more copycat journalism! Here's the article by Paul Lamb....
Can online networking offer a leg up to the disadvantaged? The founder of Street Tech aims to find out. By Paul Lamb July 20, 2004 | "Welcome to the brave new world of social networking," I tell a group of 30-odd African-American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and white adult students from low-income and underserved communities in the San Francisco East Bay. Six months ago most of them knew nothing about computers, but they will soon be certified computer technicians, having completed a rigorous technical and soft-skills training program at the nonprofit organization called Street Tech that I helped to found five years ago. Today they are learning about social networking. Despite the relative success of our job placement efforts for Street Tech graduates, some will fail for the same reasons they came to us for training -- they lack education and in-demand skills, or suffer from low self-esteem. For many the transition from street culture to mainstream business culture is a major challenge. Try to imagine the opposite scenario of a white professional moving into an urban ghetto and you can begin to understand. In addition to good skills and great mentors, what our students
really need to succeed professionally is a good social network to plug
into. As any successful professional knows, in most cases it is people
and not the classifieds that will help you get your next job and the
one after that. In fact, jobs are 10 times more likely to be found via
a professional's network than on a job board. Thirty-five to 50
percent of hires made by hiring managers come through direct
referrals. So to start this quest I called up the folks at LinkedIn, the premier social networking tool for professionals. To my pleasant surprise they not only seemed genuinely interested in helping out, but agreed to set up a group within LinkedIn for the students, supporters and employer partners of Street Tech. I have been working steadily since then to build out the group and invite as many folks as possible to join it. In theory, the more people you have in your social networking group, and the more contacts that each individual group member has, the greater your chances of connecting with friends of friends that have an appropriate job contact. According to LinkedIn, nearly half of their 600,000 current users are hiring managers. One of the real advantages I see to a tool like LinkedIn is that it allows the hiring manager to feel more comfortable about a referral because, in theory, the referral is coming from a trusted source -- thus making their chances for success much higher than if that same hiring manager just received a stranger's résumé on his or her desk. Second, our students can use the tool to search out numerous employers at one time and don't have to go to numerous job boards or make cold calls without first having an inside connection. Finally, the Internet is a much safer place for our folks to start out. Here they are anonymous and will not be judged by their physical experience or lack of mainstream professional graces. No doubt social networking is not the holy grail for the disadvantaged job seeker or social networker. It has numerous downsides. The various online social networking sites were clearly built by the educated elite for the educated elite, not for people of lower socioeconomic status. The current tools are therefore not entirely welcoming and user friendly for those on the far side of the professional divide. The premier sites are not interactive enough, and are not as attractive to younger folks and those who are more visually intuitive. Ultimately I don't know how this experiment is going to turn out, and I realize full well that face-to-face people skills are far more important than what any online social networking tool has to offer. Landing a job through social networking or any other means is only half the battle. Keeping the job and moving up the career ladder is a much bigger challenge, and one that technology tools cannot fully assist with at present. But the potential for greater opportunity through social networking is there -- all of Street Tech's students are now linked in to LinkedIn, understand clearly its advantages and disadvantages, and seem genuinely excited about using it and other social networking tools. We won't know how effective the tool is for our folks for perhaps a year or so. In the meantime I am prepared to give it my all because I have witnessed firsthand the power of technology to change people's lives and to bridge the digital divide. Ask any of our many graduates that started out with no computer skills and now are successful computer professionals and they will tell you firsthand. My hope is that social networking can indeed become a tool for social justice. Maybe then we can begin creating more and better technology tools, not just for the person with the deepest pockets, but for those whose pockets are in most need of filling. [Salon] European workers take to the streetsEuropean workers take to the streets 05/11/2004 09:08 AM Mobile technology aids escape from office routine Microsoft Streets & Trips with GPSMicrosoft Streets & Trips with GPS 07/03/2004 01:32 PM
Cobble-bone streetsCobble-bone streets 08/19/2004 11:42 AM  When construction workers in
Oslo dug a drainage ditch around a church in the "Old City" district,
they uncovered a slew of skeletons little more than a foot below the
surface. According to an Aftenposten Norway article, the skeletons
likely belong to the former tenants of a Dominican monastery located
in the area from 1240 until 1537.
"Before the Reformation the most blessed resting spots were awarded hierarchically and could be bought. The best plots lay under the holy water that drained off the church roof and dripped onto the ground below... The skeletons also bear witness to medieval times as an age of violence. Many of the bones reveal notches that must have resulted from brutal force."Link (via Fark) Barlow will be dancing in the streetsBarlow will be dancing in the streets 08/01/2004 05:05 AM This just in from the BarlowFriendz mail list...... DANCING IN THE STREETS: REVOLUTION WITH A SMILE I spent most of my political life as a Republican. While that's a little hard to imagine now, I have sufficient experience to know that the commonly held view that Republicans either can't dance or won't dance is inaccurate. When I was a Republican, I was as dedicated to dancing as I am now and there were others like me, as I recall. Still, part of what drove me from the party - aside from a categorical repudiation by the current administration of most Republican principles - is a dour dancelessness that crept into Republican "culture." It seems increasingly ironic to call the GOP a party at all... Maureen Dowd recently observed that the Republicans had become so obsessed with rejecting the 60's ethic of doing it if it feels good that they have taken up an ethic of doing it if it makes someone else feel bad. Moreover, the GOP strategy of basing their root-level organization on Hot Protestantism has infused their ranks with a lot of chilly Puritanism, which, as H.L. Mencken defined it, is "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time." These were among the factors in mind recently as I turned my thoughts to what I might do to vex the Republicans when they gather in New York a month from now. Furious as I may be at their policies, conventional protest is not an option. If it were peaceful protest, they would ignore it even if two million people turned up. They have a demonstrated capacity to do that. Indeed, the administration consists of such fervent God-anointed idealists that they would "stay the course" against any opposition short of a majority too overwhelming to rig their electronic voting machines against. If the protests in New York should turn even a little violent, it will be to Bush's benefit. This is so much the case that I rather expect to see undercover agents provocateurs scattered among the ragtag disaffected who will shortly descend on Manhattan. And the NYPD, while generally my favorite police force on the planet, can get themselves in a froth when they feel spooked. One thrown bottle could result in days of riveting television, during which Bush would have plenty of opportunity to pretend, convincingly to some, that he was Gary Cooper. Besides, anyone with an explicit intention to protest Republican policies, anyone carrying an anti-Bush sign, indeed, anyone wearing a neither a smile nor a Bush button, is likely to be corralled into one of the remote "Free Speech Zones" that Mayor Bloomberg will graciously provide his guests, there to vent his fury upon his fellow infuriated. None for me, thanks. I have another idea, and you can help. Indeed, as wild, fun-loving BarlowFriendz, I'm counting on you to help. I want to dance in the streets. I don't want to confront the Republicans. I want to discombobulate them. I don't want to argue with them, which would only convince them further, I want to throw them off their game. I don't want to be aggressive in my discontent. God knows there's been plenty of that on all sides. I want to be genial. But disconcerting. So, to that end, I propose the following: I want to organize a cadre of 20 to 50 of us. I want to dress us in suits and other plain pedestrian attire and salt us among the sidewalk multitudes in Republican-rich zones. At a predetermined moment, one of us will produce a boom-box and crank it up with something danceable. Suddenly, about a third of the people on the sidewalk, miscellaneously distributed in the general throng, will start dancing like crazy and continue to do so for for about a minute. Then we will stop, melt back into the pedestrian flow, and go to another location to erupt there. Perhaps if we enlist enough troops, we can have several platoons simultaneously exploding into dance around Manhattan, so there will be absolutely no way to tell where we might strike next. I promise you, this will make the Republicans uncomfortable. They will return to their partisan duties with a sense of disquiet that will slightly but surely fuzz the intensity of their focus. Besides, we'll enjoy it. That alone will irritate them. And we'll be doing nothing they can arrest us for. Nor, for that matter, televise us doing. By the time cameras arrive, we'll be gone. I have to admit there's nothing terribly original about this idea. I'm talking about forming a standard smart mob, similar to the group my friend Reverend Billy convenes every Tuesday to wander around the WTC PATH station, muttering the 1st Amendment. But it's a start, and I think that once we get ourselves assembled, we will be able to cook up a number of other creative pranks we might inflict on our thin-lipped countrymen. I may put up a web site that we can use to organize ourselves. In the meantime, I will start a mailing list of everyone who wants to participate. Furthermore, you can go to my blog http://blog.barlowfriendz.net where this will also be posted and participate in the discussion there. Please e-mail me at once - at barlow at eff.org - if you're interested. And pass this invitation to others who might be. I've been thinking for some time that the problem with politics is that doesn't know how to have a good time. And it certainly doesn't dance enough. This is your chance to address both of these deficiencies. And remember the great Emma Goldman who said, "If I can't dance, I want no part of your revolution." What she knew is that dancing is itself a revolutionary act. Come revolt with us. And bring your smile. Yippie-ti-yo, John Perry Barlow THE BROOKLYN RAIL - STREETSTHE BROOKLYN RAIL - STREETS 08/02/2004 01:58 PM An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley: In Conversation With Peter Lamborn Wilson brooklynrail.org/spotlight/july04/wilson.html Intel's 64-Bit Pentium 4s Hit The
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