Strange and disturbing, via geekologie.com

Possible future communication devices:

Telecom shops already seem to be growing phones in infinite variations. Nonetheless, students of the University of Dundee managed to find an original twist by creating a series of extremely specialized phones that communicate music, communicate nearness, or give you a massage when you get a message. I especially like the ‘tribal’ design of the series of devices. Although the wood style is somewhat illustrative, it is well chosen to provoke a debate about the tribal communication technology penetrating our everyday lives.

From nextnature.net.

When a disaster strikes, it’s often difficult to get shelters up in time for displaced residents. Enter Concrete Canvas’s new Concrete Cloth, a durable waterproof building material made of cement sandwiched between fabric. The cloth, which won Material ConneXion’s Material of the Year 2009 award, can be molded into any shape when bonded with water — and it takes just two hours to set!

Great, but it has one problem that they need to change:

There’s just one drawback to Concrete Cloth: the material contains PVC, a plastic that leaches toxic chemicals

.Fix that, instant shelters! Via inhabitat.com.

One of many, via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Persona. Ritual Masks and Contemporary Art features 180 ritual masks brought side by side with contemporary works by African artists or African diaspora members, which explore the question of identity, self-respect and representation of the Other.

Different century, and a different kind of patron:

A French artist has struck an unusual deal to sell his latest work: instead of paying up front, the buyer will hand over a regular fee until the artist dies.

Christian Boltanski said his deal with Australian professional gambler David Walsh was a “game” with the devil – but not a pact.

The work involves four video cameras filming Boltanski’s studio in suburban Paris, day and night, from January until his death, with images relayed live to a cave in Tasmania, Australia.

“This man (Walsh) thinks he can beat the odds and he says he never loses,” Boltanski, 65, told AFP in an interview at the studio in Malakoff, in the southwest Paris suburbs.

“Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the devil.”

Rather than handing over the price of the work in one lump sum, Walsh will make regular payments – monthly or annual, the artist did not say – until Boltanski’s death.

The longer Boltanski lives, the more Walsh has to pay.

Walsh, a professional gambler who made his fortune in casinos, worked out that he would make money from the deal if Boltanski dies within the next eight years.

“If I die in three years, he wins. If I die in 10 years, he loses,” Boltanski said.

“He has assured me I will die before the eight years is up because he never loses. He’s probably right. I don’t look after myself very well.

“But I’m going to try to survive. You can always fight against the devil.”

Via The Independent.

The Guards Chapel, spiritual home of the Household Division of the British Army, is host to an installation that looks at some of the present-day thoughts on heroes. Complete Hero is a projection-based artwork by Martin Firrell.

From mocoloco.com.

Indoor flight requires a craft to be small, light and able to negotiate walls and other obstacles. “Reality bites you a lot more indoors,” says Zhang. But Sensorfly is too small to carry the technology it would need to look for and plan around obstacles. Instead it uses simpler strategies to survive.

Each robot carries a radio, accelerometer, compass and gyroscope. Thanks to the accelerometers it notices if it bumps into something, then backs off and warns fellow copters nearby of the obstacle’s approximate location. Any time two or more of the helicopters are within radio range, they form an improvised data network to share information. Their design is “passively stable”: as long as the twin rotors are spinning, the craft will hover in place. Its shape is such that if it is knocked to the ground, the craft need only keep trying and it should be able to get airborne again.

Squadrons of the craft connect with each other using radio. They pass information between themselves and back to a controller, and use the time delay on the radio signals to track their relative positions.

From NewScientist.com

A hilly suburb of Cairo, where Coptic Christians make a living sorting and disposing of trash:

Link and photo via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Once a place to get away and make a call in privacy, phone booths now provide a place of refuge for smokers who want to get out of the cold or just smoke in peace.

Phone booths by graphic designer Simone de Graef, link and photo via nextnature.net.

Dead cassettes find new life:

The artist, Brian Demter says:

“Technology grows and mutates much like life or nature,” Dettmer has said about the connections between plastic and human bones in an interview with Time Out. “Old forms die as new forms are born. In one way, cassette tapes and other media have become outdated technology and the remaining materials have become remnants or shells that used to contain a living material.”

Link and photos via environmentalgraffiti.com.

Thinner than hair, but won’t be availible until 2020:

Sanyo is in the news today, and again it’s about the company’s green tech power. The company today announced [JP] it will do everything to become Japan’s top player in the domestic solar industry by 2012 and eventually one of the top three solar companies on a global level. At the same time, the Nikkei reports [registration required, paid subscription] that Sanyo has succeeded in developing a solar cell that’s thinner than a human hair.

The company says it will benefit greatly from a new feed-in tariff program by the Japanese government introduced this month for green energy firms. Another factor for Sanyo’s self-confidence should be the speed with which it innovates. Their new prototype solar cell is just 58 micrometers thick, about one-fourth of most solar cells currently out there. (Sorry, there’s no picture available yet)

It’s made of two types of silicon whose structure Sanyo optimized to achieve a conversion efficiency of 22%. It’s said to be as bendable as paper, meaning it can be used for a variety of purposes, for example on uneven surfaces.

Sanyo says this technology might help reduce prices by as much as 25% when compared to solar cells available today. The company wants to commercialize the solar cells by 2020.

Via crunchgear.com.

Fashion, a little technology and wild shoes:

Link via Violet Blue.

From Yahoo News:

this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse’s brain in 2006, a rat’s full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human’s cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers.

The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn’t mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats.

The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat’s brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat’s brain work together.

The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM’s, and scientists watched as different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was.

Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a “truly unprecedented scale of simulation.” Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project.

Modha says the research could lead to computers that rely less on “structured” data, such the input 2 plus 2 equals 4, and can handle ambiguity better, like identifying the corporate logo even if the image is blurry. Or such computers could incorporate senses like sight, touch and hearing into the decisions they make.

One reason that development would be significant to IBM: The company is selling “smarter planet” services that use digital sensors to monitor things like weather and traffic and feed that data into computers that are asked to do something with the information, like predicting a tsunami or detecting freeway accidents. Other companies could use “cognitive computing” to make better sense of large volumes of information.

via Mark Pesce

Gorgeous book, featuring prints from thirty-seven photographers from around the world, including ~EvidenceE~.

Ordering info here.

Missed Vol 1?

• IDN 01: The Industrial Decay Network

From bldgblog‘s flickr set, images from Studio Lindfors.

Thanks to VertigoJones for the tip!

The idea is that the Black Box electronics would be installed internally in a void space such as the pistol grip of an assault rifle. (It “fits in any weapon type”, apparently.) The gadget would run on a non-replaceable battery lasting ten years or 100,000 shots – covering the weapon handily between major overhauls.

The initial uses of the Black Box would, according to FN, be in logistics and maintenance. The in-gun shot counter would keep track of how many rounds were being fired, updating a future soldier’s digital comm/puter system – Land Warrior or some similar rig – as it went, using some form of wearable networking.

Not only would the soldier then know automatically how many shots he had fired without the need to keep count or look at his magazines and pouches, but so would his team leader – and higher commanders would be warned in advance if their people seemed likely to run out of ammo.

Most current and planned digital-soldier rigs already include GPS, in some cases enhanced by the use of other navigation aids. It seems that with the addition of Black Box, commanders may know not just how many shots their troops fire and when, but where they were as they did so – perhaps in real time. The scheme is somewhat reminiscent of the idea, sometimes suggested for US police, of automatic gun cameras intended to record the target of every shot fired for use in subsequent investigations.

Fans of Judge Dredd will recall that his personal sidearm, the Lawgiver pistol, had capabilities akin to this in some versions – perhaps going as far as the tagging of every round fired with the user’s DNA signature. (Though in the movie, even this level of record-keeping didn’t suffice to protect an innocent Dredd from being busted by his fellow judges for a crime he hadn’t committed.)

FN don’t mention DNA bullet-tagging specifically, but they do say that the Black Box is intended to form just part of their planned “Armatronics™” kit, “a fully integrated system of electronic solutions mounted on or inside a weapon. Additional enhancements for increased functionality to the system are on the horizon as new technologies are explored.”

From theregister.co.uk.

Via dvice.com.

Via crunchgear.com.