Clare Townhill

'Gin, Television, and Social Surplus'

 

I've just spent a very happy 5 minutes reading this - 'Gin, Television and Social Surplus' by Clay Shirky. There are some great epic themes here: cognitive surplus and how what we do this, the architecture of participation, social software. This last theme is something I've been thinking a lot recently whilst working for BlackBerry. Lots of apps and partnership have astonishing potential for social change in the public sector and also amongst increasingly connected users. Here's Clay's example:

Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

'Delight with Functionality'

 

Farecast has been bought by Bing - hardly surprising for such a great idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farecast

iPods in Afghanistan: a soundtrack for war

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

'Strange Meeting', Wilfred Owen

'Escape in some form or another is never far from the thoughts of a soldier serving overseas. In Strange Meeting, one of Wilfred Owen’s most haunting poems, the only escape from the trenches is a dreamlike death, a measure perhaps of the monotonous horror of the conflict in which he found himself immersed.

In contrast to his 1914-18 predecessor, the British Tommy in Helmand— even on the ever-shifting front line, where he occupies for the night some eerily abandoned compound before pushing on through the green zone the next morning — has a surprisingly wide array of technological means of keeping le cafard at bay hidden somewhere in his backpack.

Soldiers listen to the radio wherever they can get their hands on one and BFBS does sterling work broadcasting to troops from the Falklands to Fallingbostel.

But, I always found it a little cruel that Friday nights, which would otherwise have gone unremarked (as any sense of “weekend” is quickly lost on grinding six-month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan) were given over to long sets of commercial house and euphoric trance music that is being played in the sort of clubs across Europe that we couldn’t have been farther from.

Moreover, with radio you’re dependent on someone else’s playlist, so you crave something a little more personal. Gnarly Ulster veterans smile with fond memories of the early waterproof and shockproof Sony Walkmans but in truth these were too bulky and too battery-hungry to be ideal for anyone pushing too far from base. With the advent of the modern MP3 player, tiny and light with a huge memory and low battery consumption, the infantryman has an ideal companion.

The value of being able to retreat into little white headphones during precious downtime or — for the truly well prepared — to pump out through tinny portable speakers something a little more upbeat for a sunny morning in an FOB lies not just in the distraction from what otherwise might be, at best, monotonous hard work and, at worst, the most intense and extreme experiences of young soldiers’ lives, but beyond that in music’s therapeutic capacity to transport us from wherever we are.

One of the most striking things I took away from my brief experiences of close combat was how similar being ambushed, for example, felt to being in a large nightclub — the overwhelming noise, adrenalin surge, confusion and sensory overload.

Perfect, therefore, that the iPod my team had rigged up to our vehicle would, almost unfailingly, be playing something suitably hardcore when a contact flared up. Until, that is (with a sense of mischief that makes you wonder if there’s something Apple isn’t telling us), we were engaged by the Taleban for about the tenth day in a row and the shuffle function brilliantly selected Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 as we started to return fire.

I found that being able to escape like this was most useful in the long periods spent in a twilight zone of rest. Sleep comes in irregular and ill-timed little chunks to those on operations, and it’s difficult just to drift off out on the roof of some compound, marvelling at a clear night sky and wondering about the enemy, probably trying just as unsuccessfully to get some rest a few hundred metres away.

In such moments, trying to calm down after a long patrol and a big fight or, worst of all, reflecting on comrades on their way home with injuries or worse, the calming effect of a playlist redolent of happier times and home cannot be overestimated.

CNN reported this week that US troops in Afghanistan are falling victim to le cafard. Having been spoilt by the incredible welfare support structures that existed throughout the Iraq war, they had become used to internet links home, daily video calls to loved ones and the comfort and entertainment of a weekly movie night (a treat we Brits were kindly invited to join whenever we were in Camp Shorabak until we spoilt it by stealing all the popcorn).

The austerity of Helmand has taken aback some of the Americans as they readjust to the old-fashioned two-week wait for precious “snail mail”.

But the natural ingenuity of soldiers usually means that, before long, they can find a way to tamper with communications devices, rigging laptops so that DVDs can be watched in short-episode bursts while sharing a single generator point with something more important, or bypassing systems so that signallers can play solitaire to pass the long hours on radio duty.

In the rear, the popularity of handheld games consoles and even larger systems is obvious. Tent buddies club together to buy full-size TVs, a worthwhile investment at the start of a long six months, with bargains to be had in the thriving trade that goes on between incoming and outgoing formations during any handover period. This guarantees that, for at least a couple of hours a week, through a game or a movie, they will be briefly somewhere else.

And out on the line, the guys trying to sleep will, if they’re anything like I was, rely on the iPod shuffle function to throw up more surprises: Girls Aloud as flares light up the evening and the choppers thunder low across the valley. Now that’s what I call escapism.'

How the iPod became essential infantry kit Whether it’s hardcore songs for battle or rigging up a DVD, soldiers in Helmand choose a personal escape route from war

The paunch is the new six-pack

If a recent survey carried out by Lion Bar Icecream is true women prefer their men, fatter, scruffier and dirtier than GQ would have us believe. Here's David Mitchell's very funny piece from The Observer yetserday:

Half of humanity received some much-needed assistance from an unexpected source last week. Out of the blue, Lion Bar Ice Cream leapt to the aid of men. Like maggots in a wound, they didn't know they were helping – they thought they were just garnering some desperately needed publicity in an ice cream-unfriendly summer – but they may have contributed to saving the world's males huge sums of money and an even greater expense of time and effort.

Lion Bar Ice Cream commissioned a survey into what sort of men women find attractive, presumably in the forlorn hope that "a man with his face in a Lion Bar Ice Cream" or "those hunks made ripplingly obese by an ice cream-only diet" would be among the responses.

They didn't quite get that, but more than 4,000 of the 5,000 respondents claimed to prefer a slightly scruffy fellow, with messy hair and even a beer belly, to the toned, groomed, David Beckham type, although I imagine they wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating a Lion Bar. The media spin on it is that: "Women have turned against the metrosexual look", presumably because there's something very unattractive about a chap running after a tube train with a hard-on.

"Fantastic!" the male readership may now be burping from their sofas. "I'll have another couple of pork pies and a Guinness. I knew I was over-washing!" And, indeed, these 5,000 women do seem very obliging: a fifth of them don't mind "a bit of body odour", 10% have no objection to man boobs and another 10% like their men to smell of beer. They like their men to smell of beer? That's an evolutionary cul-de-sac if ever I heard one: "Oh yeah, pick the paunchy, pissed one – he'll be there for you in a crisis." It's almost impossible to evade the conclusion that most of these women were on the pull.

Sunday Observer:Congratulations, you flobby slob, now you're a sex symbo

One Nation, Seven Deadly Sins

A geographers methodology for measuring propensity for evil:

Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. On this map, done in yellow, Clark County is bile (see map on Page 2).

Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts -- robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars. Rendered in green, of course, Clark County is emerald.

Wrath was calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes -- murder, assault and rape -- reported to the FBI per capita. Vought and his colleagues used the color red to illustrate wrath, so Clark County looks like a fresh welt. Washoe is slightly statistically duller. Everywhere else is a friendly pork pink.

Lust was calculated by compiling the number of sexually transmitted diseases -- HIV, AIDS, syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea -- reported per capita. Here again, Clark and Washoe counties are worst. Carson City County is a close third.

Gluttony was calculated by counting the number of fast food restaurants per capita, and this is one category where Clark County is bested. First in deep fry goes to Carson City.

Sloth was calculated by comparing expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation with the rate of employment. Here again Clark County is beat, scoring only average on the scale of sloth.

And pride, lastly, is most important. The root of all sins, in this study, is the aggregate of all data. Vought and his Kansas colleagues combined all data from the six other sins and averaged it into an overview of all evil. So pride, mapped in purple, shows the states two darkest bruises: counties Clark and Carson City.

Thanks to Alistair for this.

Full slideshows of sins and states here

The Flight Patterns of Insects Around a Streetlight

flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.

'Charlie McCarthy, a Michigan based film maker shot 156 photographs of insects flying around a street light. He then put the shots together to make a pretty cool short video.'

Beautiful.

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