Links da Semana

Links da Semana #21

Links da Semana

Media interventions in the city: assembling new publics of strangers

“Cities have always been spaces of friction where people encounter others in physical public space, and must find a way to deal with each other. According to anthropologist David Harvey, the defining of a politics that can bridge the multiple heterogeneities in the city without repressing differences is one of the biggest urban challenges of today”.

Gigantes da tecnologia se unem para pedir regulação da vigilância

“Oito das principais empresas de tecnologia do mundo (AOL, Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn e Twitter) se uniram para formular uma carta aberta enviada nesta segunda-feira (9/12/13) ao governo dos Estados Unidos para pedir uma reforma global na maneira como é realizada a vigilância do governo americano, e possivelmente de outros países, em relação os usuários ao redor do mundo, de forma que os dados pessoais de indivíduos e empresas estejam mais protegidos.”

Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time

Ellul, who died in 1994, was the author of a series of books on the philosophy of technology, beginning with “The Technological Society,” published in France in 1954 and in English a decade later. His central argument is that we’re mistaken in thinking of technology as simply a bunch of different machines. In truth, Ellul contended, technology should be seen as a unified entity, an overwhelming force that has already escaped our control. That force is turning the world around us into something cold and mechanical, and—whether we realize it or not—transforming human beings along with it.

Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind

Some functions of physical books that seem to have no digital place are nevertheless being retained. An author’s autograph on a cherished title looked as if it would become a relic. But Apple just applied for a patent to embed autographs in electronic titles. Publishers still commission covers for e-books even though their function — to catch the roving eye in a crowded store — no longer exists.

Big Data in Security – Part I: TRAC Tools

Hadoop encompasses HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and the MapReduce programming framework. Hadoop is very useful and something we use, but it’s not the only way of interacting with the data. The reason Hadoop is the industry standard for handling big data is because it’s very scalable. As you throw more disks and computing resources at it you receive better performance and higher data processing capabilities. It’s trivial to add more resources; scaling from a five node cluster to a thousand node cluster doesn’t excessively increase the burden to the administrator. Hadoop is also extremely fault tolerant. If a disk, or node, or even a whole rack of nodes goes down your data is replicated across the cluster in such a way that you won’t lose any data. The running jobs that are processing data are also fault tolerant, restarting tasks when necessary to ensure all the data is processed correctly. So you don’t have to worry about the nasty issues associated with big data spanning across multiple disks and multiple machines. Hadoop takes care of the resilience, fault tolerance, and scalability issues for you.

The Emerging Technologies Shaping Future 5G Networks

Smarter devices should also help shape the networks of the future. So instead of signals being routed by the base station, smart devices will do this job instead, choosing between a variety of different options. For modern smartphones, that should be a relatively straightforward task.

New York Crime on Google Maps

The map allows users to view crime data for any month since January 2012 and to filter the results by type of crime. If you zoom in on the map you can view the data by individual incidents of crime or as a heat map. If you search for a location it is also possible to compare the local crime data with crime in the city as a whole.