I was invited to attend this year's SCU+MIT workshop, an annual collaboration between MIT and Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. SCU flew 18 MIT students out to Taipei and put them up for 10 days of intensive work designing interventions for three different sites in Taipei (the Shilin Night Market, the Meiti Riverside Park, and the Taipei metro).
Our flight there went via Tokyo; the JFK -> Tokyo arc took us right over Canada and Alaska, titillating my obsesssion with taiga.
Denali from the airplane
Meandering streams
Sunset glow under clouds
The perpetual sunset lasted us for the last half of our west-bound trip, concluding with a dramatic wash of color over Mt. Fuji as we landed in Tokyo.
The workshop was a flurry of activity, 10 days crammed with intensive struggles at communication, decision making, brainstorming, and critique. A rapid introduction to the architectural crit process (rapid design towards frequent presentations with whithering critiques) combined with a lesson in cultural differences in expectations for faculty/student hierarchy (professors who were given special treatment, insulated from contact with students, and engaged in critique by making assertions from high rather than engaging in mutual discussions).
On my team, I was the only one ignorant of Chinese, but also the only one with strong English (everyone spoke a bit of English, but struggled at times). Since the workshop was conducted in English (a fact that felt a bit uncomfortably colonial to me), I had the awkward position of being the spokesperson of the group while also having some difficulty in engaging and communicating fluently with the members of my team. Gracious efforts in accomodating language and frequent tireless translation work by the team members with better English helped us to talk, and we even managed to get something approaching a consensus decision making process going.
After several stumbling starts, my team settled chose to develop an intervention for the Meiti Riverside Park. Our final concept was for a large scale public art installation consisting of thousands of lights placed across the park and river. The lights contain motion sensors, and respond to people or vehicles passing, affecting a simulation of fish swimming around the light field – lights turning on and off representing the position of flocking fish. My task was writing a fully functioning simulation of the entire installation.
The simulated fish are of 3 different types: pushers, chasers, and schoolers. The schoolers flock together, and run away from disturbances, and can be seen dancing through the grassy fields or swarming over the water. The pushers act like logs, and don't move unless you bump into them. The chasers are attracted to disturbances and follow you around if you get close enough to one.
Our final presentation:
All of the presentations are available on youtube. A big thank you to SCU and especially my group members Sky, Lisa, Shuo, Amy, Cicada and Chloe for showing me a wonderful time.
Jan 04, 2010
∞
Here are two small but potentially useful python scripts I've recently written:
getzips, a utility to scrape the USPS website to get all current zip codes, and the addressable cities within them.
coldcaller, a utility to notify you when the weather forecast temperature drops below a threshold, to warn you when the pipes might freeze.
Aren't tiny url's
an odd evolutionary adaptation in the Internet? Intricate structures that
solve an immediate problem caused by technological choices (web developers who
use very long URLs and query-strings, application developers who impose
limitations on message lengths, email implementations that cause links to get
split over long lines).
The result is a surprisingly brittle solution, where millions of URLs per day
are run through redirection services. The growth of affiliate and marketing
campaign tracking has spurred a small industry around shortened URLs. But what
happens when one of these businesses goes under? The meaning behind millions
of tweets gets lost (the horror!)?
An Internet Archive-sponsored consortium called 301works.org (301 is the HTTP code
for a redirect) has formed to ensure that the links of its members can be
preserved for all eternity.
Constructing it turned out to be difficult, since
several of the major shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im) blacklist
major known url shorteners to prevent spammers from using redirect chains to
obfuscate URLs. Fortunately, there are abundant
URL shorteners to choose from, many of which are not so scrupulous, and many
of which are not yet known to the major shorteners. I also avoided shorteners
such as ow.ly and su.pr which add annoying frames (which are preserved through
redirect chains, but which crush each other).
John, when playing a game of Scrabble against Dick who, whilst pondering
the degree of legitimacy the last word that Harry (who had had 'had') had
had had had, had had 'had', had had 'had'. Had 'had' had more letters, he
would have played it again.
Most lenders will, in other words, take full advantage of the asymmetry of
norms between lender and homeowner and will use the threat of damaging the
borrower’s credit score to bring the homeowner into compliance.... On a
fundamental level, the asymmetry of moral norms for
borrowers and market norms for lenders gives lenders an
unfair advantage in negotiations related to the enforcement of contractual
rights and obligations.... This imbalance is exaggerated by the credit
reporting system, which gives lenders the power to threaten borrowers’
human worth and social status by damaging their credit scores—scores
that serve as much as grades for moral character as they do for
creditworthiness. The result is a predictable imbalance in which
individual homeowners have born a huge and disproportionate burden of
the housing collapse.
