Neurosphere

Here in Colorado, water is scarce. I’ve become very aware of the cycles of mountain snow-pack runoff which fills the local streams, seeing the floods in the spring and how many of them totally dry up by mid-summer. I think in these days of global warming, it behooves us to get more in tune with environmental cycles. Here’s a site that does that locally. The presentation is kind of primitive – those line graphs are right out of Lotus 1-2-3 or something – but it does the basic job of remote access to the sensors out in the watershed.

“BASIN is a local community service network offering public access to environmental information. BASIN’s initial focus is on water in Boulder County, CO: where it comes from, goes to and how we use it.”

http://bcn.boulder.co.us/basin/

Interesting to compare this to the TenByTen site we profiled a couple days ago. What news organizations find “important”, vs. the celebrity archetypes that seem to be part of our personal spheres of interest.

1. oscars

2. anna nicole smith

3. kirby puckett

4. june carter

5. walk the line

6. jessica alba

7. ash wednesday

8. johnny cash

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

These are an interesting combo of high tech and low tech (“the street finds its own uses for things”) to give each other a status update on the world around us.

“grafedia: words written anywhere, then linked to images, video or sound files online.”

www.grafedia.com

Grafedia now takes the place of Hey Stranger at the Glowlab site. Glowlab is a pretty interesting “magazine of psychogeography and contemporary art.” In the Hey Stranger project, New York artist Christina Ray wrote “Hey stanger, what are you up to today” on clear tape and stuck it in locations around Brooklyn, with an email response address. She posted the answers at Glowlab.

http://www.glowlab.com/lab/artist_project.php?project_id=56&artist_id=37

This is really cool. My book cited comic book author Alan Moore who invented a character who had invented a set-up a lot like this (The Watchmen, circa 1990?) The visual element is a step forward – humans process the visual more quickly and holistically than the word. Video would be a logical next step.

“Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.”

http://www.tenbyten.org/10×10.html

Disasters and wars seem to speed up technology development. Here’s recent developments in worldwide sensors for early warning on tsunamis.

“Indonesia won’t rely solely on seismic signals in making a call on a tsunami. Last month, scientists deployed the first two seafloor sensors of the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System. The devices, whose development was spearheaded by the National Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, measure sea- floor vibrations and pressure changes in the water column

The U.S.-made Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis tsunameters–each a buoy and an associated bottom pressure sensor–already serve as sentinels for the PTWC in Hawaii. It’s the only such device that’s been “tried and tested,” notes IOC’s Erb. At a price tag of $250,000 per buoy and a design life of 1 year, the network won’t come cheap, nor will it come quickly: The U.S. factory that produces the buoys was inundated by Hurricane Katrina, so production is lagging, sources say.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/5754/1602