Google tool uses search terms to detect flu outbreaks

"We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports."

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Banksy Defends His Guerrilla Graffiti Art

times
bbc
wiki

Fredric Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

While the anxieties about privacy seem to have diminished, in a situation in which its tendential erosion or even abolition has come to stand for nothing less than the end of civil society itself.

It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigors of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own anymore, or secrets that anybody else cares about in the first place.

But the variable that gears the rest, as always, is the more fundamental transition from the private to the corporate, the latter unmasking the former and thereby problematizing the very judicial system on which it is itself constructed.

How there could be private things, let alone privacy, in a situation in which almost everything around us is functionally inserted into larger institutional schemes and frameworks of all kinds, which nonetheless belong to somebody – this is now the nagging question that haunts the camera dollying around our various life-worlds, looking for a lost object the memory of which it cannot quite retain.

the plan

click to enlarge

Behavioral Setting

Tom Markus, in his masterful study of the way buildings relate to systems of power and domination, has used this form of analysis most persuasively (Markus 1993). When we consider the question of surveillance and supervision, such geometry is likely to be quite critical in determining the success or otherwise of a spatial organization. Markus shows that prisons and hospitals have mostly been designed with a topology that centralizes control and facilitates supervision. In fact, the so-called Nightingale hospital ward was first suggested by Florence Nightingale entirely from the nurse's perspective (Nightingale 1860) - such layouts make it easy to see all the patients from a single nurse's station, thus minimizing effort...It does seem quite likely that this very simple idea of the topology of space has a strong impact on the synomorphy - how the physical and social structures are in harmony - of spaces in which such social arrangements are of prime importance.
- The Language of Space, Bryan Lawson p. 241

photosynth | microsoft live labs

Big companies like microsoft and google are searching for efficient technologies to map the earth. photosynth will be able to sift through millions of flickr pools and metadata(*.exif), to create a 3d point cloud of nearly every photographed space on earth harvesting our collective memories and organizing them for us in a hybrid 2d/3d environment. It's only a matter of time before some software genius figures out how to harvest high-def youtube footage, live streaming cellphone feeds from qik.com, traffic cams, google street-view, and live-satellite imagery.

Will this program fullfill David Brin's dream and provide a new medium for the "transparent society", or will this just add to the goverment's fine arsenal of surveillant technologies?

The Unblinking Eye

Tracking Big Brother's movements over the past decade.

Back in December 1996, sci-fi novelist David Brin warned that street cams would soon be everywhere ("The Transparent Society"). In his dream for the future, every citizen would have full access to the image stream. So far, the authorities have enjoyed a one-way view. But Brin was right that each year, surveillance tech would get tinier, more mobile, and more clever.
-Clare Baldwin & Wired magazine

MIT researchers are working to outfit entire forests with a sensor network, powered by the trees themselves, that could help spot fires earlier and even identify situations that could result in fires. The new sensor system aims to turn trees into a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree.

The U.S. Forest Service currently predicts and tracks fires with a variety of tools, including remote automated weather stations. But these stations are expensive and sparsely distributed. Additional sensors could save trees by providing better local climate data to be used in fire prediction models and earlier alerts. The new system aims to provide power to the sensors where traditional recharging or battery replacement is impractical and costly.

- Mass High Tech Staff

disposable organic sensors networks (DOSN)

The military is developing Disposable Organic Sensors Networks (DOSN.) Also referred to as unattended ground sensor (UGS) Here's and interesting link with a few excerpted sentences following...

http://www.dtic.mil/descriptivesum/Y2004/Army/0602709A.pdf

Disposable Sensor Network. In FY04, research low cost, throw away visible/near infrared active pixel imaging sensors and non-imaging sensors for increased situational awareness and survivability in open and complex terrain operations. A Disposable Sensors Network project will be performed in concert with Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and will apply industry expertise in high volume, low cost electronic components and imaging systems to demonstrate prototypes. This program will focus on developing mature key technologies for very small, low cost multi-functional unattended ground sensors to be disbursed on the battlefield and fuse data to help detect & classify threats.

Basically, drop thousands of inexpensive sensors covering a large area. The sensors sense, of course, and network, sending their information and location to the next node. Node by node, the information eventually reaches computing centers.

Or, that's close.

I read the other day that the same technology is being used to protect forests. Put thousands of sensors on tress that can sense fire and signal their next node, and node by node the information eventually reaching a computer where the data is acted on.

It strikes me that Sousveillance is another version of "disposable organic sensors network." Only, we're the organic part. Ironic! We will try our best to avoid the disposable part!!

Power to the people!

'The sousveillance dome is a kind of Situationist critique of surveillance, in the manner of an inverse surveillance.

By re-situating the everyday familiar objects of ubiquitous surveillance ("eye in the sky") down at human level, we reverse the Sur (French for "above") to Sous (French for "below").'

http://wearcam.org/domewear/

Sousveillance

Surveillance, from the French for “watching over,” refers to the monitoring of people by some higher authority — the police, for instance. Now there’s sousveillance, or “watching from below.” It refers to the reverse tactic: the monitoring of authorities (Tony Blair, for instance) by informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant against the excesses of the powers that be.

A British newspaper tried to harness the power of sousveillance to better cover the recent political campaign in Britain. Concerned that the Labor Party was insulating Blair from media coverage, The Guardian’s Web site asked its readers for help in keeping track of him. “Limited access means we need your help to keep up with Mr. Blair,” the paper announced. “So today we announce the Blair Watch Project, where we ask you to send us your photos of the P.M. on the campaign trail.”

By JASCHA HOFFMAN
New York Times

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/tonyblair