Hosted in the beautiful city of Berlin, Re:publica 2011 is Germany's largest annual conference on blogs, new media and the digital society, drawing thousands of participants from across the world for three days of exciting conversations and presentations. The conference venue was truly a spectacular one and while conference presentations are typically limited to 10-20 minutes, the organizers gave us an hour to share our stories. So I'm posting the video of my presentation below for anyone interested in learning more about new media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, live maps, crisis response, civil resistance, digital activism and check-in's. I draw on my experience with Ushahidi and the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) and share examples from Kenya, Haiti, Libya, Japan, the US and Egypt to illustrate how live maps can change the world.
From BSA listserve: Excellent article on integration of 3G, LTE, Wifi and land lines i.e.- 5G networking. The only thing missing is this article is the 5th “G” – green networking. With so much overlapping coverage from the different wireless and wired nodes you don’t need five nines reliability for each node. Individual nodes can therefore be powered with small solar panels and micro wind mills. This is also great opportunity for R&E networks to partner with carriers like Vodafone and others who are building integrated Wifi/LTE networks and use Eduroam to extend reach of their networks for personal health research applications, sensor networks built around smart phone etc. For more details please see http://goo.gl/W9mla and http://goo.gl/a1Lpz – BSA]
21st Century Triple Networks: Ubiquitous 4G, WiFi, & Wires
The best engineers on the planet are coming to the same conclusion: a hybrid 4G/WiFi/landline network is the way to meet mobile demand. Folks like John Donovan of AT&T and Masayoshi Son of Softbank in Japan
had this vision around 2007-2008. As the iPhone/iPad/Android made the coming demand clear, networks planners around the world evolved similar strategies.
• 4G gives wide coverage but is limited in capacity.
• WiFi actually provides far more capacity, because the range of perhaps 100 meters means the spectrum can be reused thousands of times in a major city. (China Mobile is putting 20,000 WiFi hotspots across
Beijing.) A network builder tells me “WiFi is a solution to off load ‘portable' traffic where possible and rely on 3G/4G for ‘mobile' traffic.” Femtos and perhaps small cells will play a significant part.
• Landlines effectively have 10x the capacity of a similar wireless network and are already ubiquitous from both telco and cable. A top engineer tells me “The general rule is the quicker you can get the byte of information onto a hard facility (copper, fiber) the cheaper it is to operate the network.” Randall Stephenson of AT&T explains “You're always going to have to have a fixed line capability to offload this traffic.”
[…]
So cell tower 3G/4G ideally is supplemented with local WiFi/femto. Cell towers cover large areas, allowing comprehensive coverage except for a few dead spots. They offer limited bandwidth over that entire
area, with a network like Verizon's LTE offering perhaps 35 megabits to share. WiFi is much lower power, limiting range to a typical 100 meters or so, less with obstructions. Within that range, the capacity is high; 3×3 MIMO 802.11N can carry 100's of megabits in a small area. Locally, 802.11 uses spectrum more efficiently, incorporated a limited set of “spread-spectrum” type features.
WiFi was in few phones two years ago because it ran down batteries too quickly and cost too much. Moore's Law now enables low power, low cost WiFi. The latest chips from RALINK/Trendchip, for example, cost
less than $5. Off mode power consumption is 0.012 mw, transmit power is 19dBm, and the chips are 5 to 7 mm square. Easily 3/4ths of the phones sold by a carrier like Verizon will soon have WiFi as do just
about all tablets. As Qualcomm, Broadcom and others include WiFi on their primary cellphones chips it will become ubiquitous.
[…]
Carriers are choosing different strategies to get from where they are today to triple networks. Vodafone, Europe's largest wireless company, is adding millions of DSL customers through unbundling and giving them
femto+WiFi gateways. Sky in Britain is buying a WiFi network named “The Cloud.” Free.fr enables WiFi on their millions of DSL connections and bought a wireless license. AT&T is putting WiFi hotspots from Times Square NY to San Francisco with expansion plans. China Mobile is adding 1,000,000 hotspots.
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Tip of the Hat to original poster Bill St. Arnaud.
Phi Beta Iota:Gordon Cook thinks very highly of Bill St. Arnaud, and observes that Mr. Arnaud is a consultant for Surfnet in the Netherlands working out their wireless cloud for the research and education community in that country of some 1,000,000 out of 16,000,000 people. He is describing some of what he is building that is based on the Netherlands national fiber backplane.
The rise in national security secrecy in the first full year of the Obama Administration was matched by a sharp increase in the financial costs of the classification system, according to a new report to the President (pdf).
The estimated costs of the national security classification system grew by 15% last year to reach $10.17 billion, according to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). It was the first time that annual secrecy costs in government were reported to exceed $10 billion.
An additional $1.25 billion was incurred within industry to protect classified information, for a grand total of $11.42 in classification-related costs, also a new record high.
We bring Planet, People and Products into harmony through the projects in which we involve ourselves and others. Design Earth, the portal, is allied with other sites that, collectively, are central to a whole systems approach to creating sustainablilty. These include Wiser Earth, Digital Earth, a certification portal, Commonwealth of Learning, oneVillage Foundation, and a portal to open higher education sites such as MIT's Open University. Others include Live Earth and Many One.
ScienceDaily (May 3, 2011) — A new study from the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm School of Economics shows that the brain has built-in mechanisms that trigger an automatic reaction to someone who refuses to share.
. . . . . . .
“This is an incredibly interesting result that shows that it isn't just processes in the prefrontal cortex and insula that determine this kind of decision about financial equitability, as was previously thought,” says Professor Martin Ingvar. “Our findings, however, can also have ethical implications since the use of certain drugs can clearly affect our everyday decision-making processes.”
This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council, The Barbro and Bernard Osher Foundation, The Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems.
Initially, a place to store all your photos and artwork that’s as
awesome as, if not more awesome than, existing network services (Flickr, DeviantArt, SmugMug, Picasa, etc)
Later, a place for all sorts of media, such as video, music, etc hosting. Federated with OStatus!
Customizable!
A place for people to collaborate and show off original and derived
creations. Free, as in freedom. We’re a GNU project in the making, afterall.
EBD, or ‘emergent by design,’ was the phrase I chose when naming this blog to describe what I was seeing around me in the most inspiring and passionate people and organizations making positive change in themselves and the world around them. To me, that means not being a passive bystander to life and letting it happen to you, but really grabbing life by the short and curlies and manifesting greatness in this epic adventure!
I’ve been on Twitter now for about 2 years, and love finding people doing amazing things. It gives me hope & energizes my spirit. I shared my technique for Twitter a while back – with “How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence.” Let this be the 2011 curated update.
Here are some people I’d recommend following for their passion, creativity, wisdom, empathy, intelligence, and love. Some I’ve met in real life, many I simply admire from a far. I would be so curious to see what would happen if we got all them together in the same room. (how bout at Contact?) 😉
Who’s on your list of awesome? Let us know in the comments below. And here we are, in no particular order:
