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Unbeknownst to the throngs of iPhone owners bitching and moaning on their tech blogs and micro-messages over AT&T’s poor wireless service, the telecom giant has a much bigger problem, the most French of business problems, one which has led thousands of suburban middle managers to buy their first steel-toed work boots: impending union strike.¹

On August 7, 1983 the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) began a 22-day strike against AT&T. The strike marked the last time the two unions, which at the time represented 700,000 AT&T employees, were able to collectively bargain for all it’s workers. Months later on January 1, 1984, the decade-old anti-trust suit, United States v. AT&T, culminated in the divestment of the national monopoly into seven regional “Baby Bells”, fragmenting with it the unionized workforce. continue reading »

Hot on the heels of my post about Phorm, a company that’s partnered with ISPs to record every website a person visits, Adam Greenfield points us to Path Intelligence, a real-world counterpart to internet tracking. In short, Path Intelligence installs devices in shopping malls which triangulate mobile phones in order track the exact location and movement of shoppers. This “FootPath™” data is then used by mall and business owners to identify logistical faults and marketing opportunities: What areas are generating congestion? What stores do shoppers who frequent one store also regularly visit? What stores see more traffic on rainy days?

Looking at a demo of the Path Inelligence UI, I’m reminded of the heatmaps videogame developer Bungie produces with data gathered from online play of Halo 3. The heatmaps, which visualize the locations of kills and deaths by specific weapon types, are used by level designers to ensure playing fields are well balanced and kills are evenly distributed across the terrain (Does a map bias a certain weapon type? Does map asymmetry give one team an advantage?). What’s more interesting is that Bungie produces a heatmap of every players’ indivdual kills and deaths, and that data has proven to be an excellent strategic resource more serious competitors (Am I more accurate with the sniper rifle when firing from the tower or up on the hill? Should I be using the shotgun or rifle in narrow corridors?). But I digress… continue reading »

Found myself watching episodes of the 20-year-old television series, The Secret Lives of Machines, in which Tim Hunkin introduces the first seasons’ finale on Television with:

Of all the machines in the home, the Television is probably the most mysterious. […] And all that’s inside these machines is a mass of equally mysterious bits an pieces, none of which appears to do anything at all.

No moving parts, nothing which affords us any understanding of how they work just by taking a peak inside. But once the program does get around to demystifying the inner workings of CRT televisions, juxtaposed against today’s display technologies, we’re reminded just how mechanical they really are: heaters warm-up, guns fire, electrons fly, magnets deflect, meshes intercept and lines scan. In all, there seems to be quite a bit of “motion” taking place inside these machines. And in fact, as Hunkin also reminds us, the very first television system invented by John Logie Baird was in the most literal sense a mechanical device. continue reading »

Yes, that’s an elephant carrying a video camera. And yes, that’s a monkey grabbing said camera. For three years, elephants were employed to film a documentary on tigers in Pench National Park, India. BBC reports:

Cameras held by elephants’ trunks have been used to provide an intimate view of tigers in the jungle.

Because the big cats are used to the presence of elephants, the tusked giants were able to get far closer to them than a human film crew ever could.

Thanks to the “trunk-cams”, the team was able to follow four newborn tiger cubs all the way through to adulthood.

The footage was recorded over a period of three years in the Pench National Park in India.

This isn’t strapping electronics to animals. This is elephants trained to carry and set down HD cameras. Watch the videos – it’s even more absurd than it sounds. One camera, which looks a bit like R2D2 disguised as a tree, is equipped with wheels and can be driven around remotely when it’s set down on the jungle floor. continue reading »

Just starting to dig a deeper into the cultural impact of exhaustive recording – part emerging technology, part byproduct of ubiquitous computing. The question is simple: What changes when everything is recorded? What new consumption and production practices emerge in such a future? I don’t mean to imply there will ever be a time when everything is recorded, but the trends I’m seeing are definitely, um, trending in that direction…

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a story on a company called Replay Solutions. They record computing:

For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, especially the ones that can’t be reproduced, like the proverbial noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit the mechanic.

Mr. Lindo says he and Mr. Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they couldn’t find while working together at an Internet start-up in 2002. “We were spending almost all of our time not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”’ Mr. Lindo recalls.

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