We have talked about this before, Remember Bob Lutz of GM saying about fuel prices- "Rich people don't care"? Well it turns out they do, and are trading in the Hummers for Hondas. And not only because of fuel prices- According to the New York Times, "For Janna Jensen, it was the dirty looks and nasty gestures from other drivers that finally persuaded her to give up the family's $55,000 Hummer H2. Her husband, Michael, meanwhile, was tired of the $300 monthly gasoline cost and the quality problems that began soon after they bought it." and "The higher cost of gasoline plays a big role, as it has for the last year of high oil prices. But wealthy buyers, who used to shrug off the expense, are shifting gears, as excessive energy consumption is becoming socially embarrassing." The celebrity campaigns, the T shirts and a little help from high gas prices have made a difference- Driving a big SUV is like smoking- it is becoming socially unacceptable. ::New York Times

UPDATE: John Laumer called this one in July
Seth Godin called this one 9 months ago in our interview:

Ralph Ammer and Stefan Sagmeister have teamed up to create an installation which was first exhibited at Austrian Cultural Forum last week in NYC. It uses the aphorism Being not truthful works against me taken from Sagmeister's diary Things I have learned in my life so far. Like many of his works, it is a handwritten sentence which is being reproduced in an unusual way.

The words, generatively built up in form of a spiderweb through a custom software developed by Ralph Ammer, are projected on a wall. The installation also includes a small camera which is filming the area in front of the projection in order to create a mirror-like situation. The spiderweb is being superimposed on the live image and when a person moves in front of the screen, he or she warps the web until it beautifully rips apart. After the person is gone, the web will gradually rebuild and the maxim lasts until the next disturbance.

The piece seeks to question both the notion of truthfulness as such and the general issue of turning a statement into a rule, even if just a personal one: "This fragile construction serves as a metaphor for the vulnerability of the maxim and the effort to perpetuate it. In a sense it is "physically" questioned by everybody who passes and damages it."

Video (9 mb)

AP - More than 1,500 Venezuelans shed their clothes on a main city avenue Sunday to pose for American photographer Spencer Tunick, forming a human mosaic in front of a national symbol: a statue of independence hero Simon Bolivar.

[update - video here]

Reporting on Friday Late: Transvision.

London based Sennep created an interactive dandelion for this event. Elegantly simple and playful, this installation allowed users to blow away the seeds of a dandelion clock using a real electric hairdryer.
“blowing it apart is a popular pastime for children. The number of blows required to completely rid the clock of its seeds is deemed to be the time of day.” - Wikipedia.

Rajesh, a TreeHugger reader, asks "why people in the US are not taught to turn off the lights when they leave the room. This is especially evident in all the businesses (offices and stores) across the country that have most of the lights (computers and other electric appliances) turned on, even at night". Good question. For many of us it's the 'cobwebs in the corner' syndrome. Once ignored, the webs become invisible until a visitor points them out, or, in a lucid moment, they intrude through the web pages we have set our gaze upon. Like perennial Teenagers, we aquired the lights-on habit during a time of dirt cheap electric bills, when climate change shown only on the brows of a few eccentric scientists -- and we continue walking away Zombie-like from the consequences.

Reporting on Friday Late: Transvision.

One of my favorite pieces from the transvision night was a responsive LED sculpture by United Visual Artists. Installed in the John Madejski Garden, from afar looked like people worshiping the arrival of an alien spaceship, whilst up close you could feel the warmth of all those LEDs. As you approached it, custom camera tracking software detected your presence and reacted by changing the visuals and booming out some granular synthesis sounds through the large speakers. This project created a great atmosphere in the garden and had an aura about it. For a better explanation, watch the video.

Some questions for Joel Gethin Lewis of UVA…

What was the concept behind the piece?
We really didn’t want to compete with all the work already in the V&A, but
did want to make a comment about the architecture of the space itself. The
garden was a natural choice. We choose LED as a display technology because
its quality of light. Emissive, rather than reflective. An obviously new
thing to contrast against the sense of history evident in the V&A
collections.

We also wanted to make a piece that was aggressive and repelled people, one
that forced people to engage with the position in the space, and their
relation to the monolith.

2001 was also an obvious inspiration!

How does the software work?
Using the latest generation of our in-house software system we linked the
LED display, a 2D camera and an audio system. Analysing the live video from
the camera allowed us to see the relative position of the closest person to
the front of the monolith. In this way we could trigger differing
combinations of light and sound.

Did you notice anything about peoples reactions or behaviours that you
didn’t expect to see?
Crowd control was a major issue. At the beginning of the night, when it was
quieter, it was great to see some young kids playing with the system. They
have no expectations or fear of technology, so it was great to get
un-polluted testing from them. It was also fascinating to see the learning
process, how people came up with explanations for the system and how they
communicated it to peers. Its always difficult to deal with large groups of
people.

More information.

The EU's INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.

Geographic data is a key to unlocking information collected by government on behalf of the public - census, voting, planning, utilities, environmental, transport information. Google Maps/Earth mashups are just starting to show us what can be done by overlaying different kinds of environmental and social information over freely available base maps.

The Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament gets the chance to roll back some of these changes next Tuesday (21st March).

An open letter from Public Geodata urges the Committee to consider this not as a niche technical issue, but as a core component of the management of civil society in the information age. We need your signature -- and particularly the signature of your organisation -- on this letter to prevent the basic information about the lands where we live from being hijacked by a few companies to all our detriment.

We are writing to convey our concerns regarding the current draft of the INSPIRE directive on establishing a common framework for sharing geographic information in Europe. This is an important issue as it is estimated that fully 80% of all information collected by government has a spatial component and geographic information is needed for environmental, census, and transport purposes among many others. Moreover state-collected geographic information is a public good and, as demonstrated by several studies, open access to it is the only way to realize its full social and commercial potential for Europe.

However since the first draft of INSPIRE, a set of amendments have been introduced which restrict the rights of the public to access, or even know about the existence of, geographic information that they have paid to collect. Thus in its current form, as found in the Council's common position, the directive not only fails to promote open access but risks doing the very opposite.

This would be a disastrous outcome and one which ran against the very purpose of INSPIRE. As the Commission itself, has stated in this regard: "the common position could have the effect of reducing rather than increasing the availability of spatial data. ... The text of the common position leaves too much scope for data providers to refuse to give public access to their data and share it with other authorities."

a large collection of beautiful maps based on data related to Switzerland & printed on large 2mx2m panels. these infographics are part of an attempt to find new ways to describe the identity of Switzerland ranging from the scientific to the artistic. "visualizations can help to propose new ways of thinking. they can help to see oneself not only in the historically grown context but also in the flux of globalization. the graphic language of the maps, based on the density of information used in an atlas, is meant to go beyond the straightforward transfer of information & to evoke associations & open up space for fantasy".
more Swiss infographics maps after the break. see also swiss virtual IPO.
[hosoyaschaefer.com & hosoyaschaefer.com (pdf)|via unige.ch]

* Did the octopus have sex with the walrus, or where does the baby come from?
* Why does everybody abuse it?
* Are the two octopuses really one and the same person?

I don't know, but the result is what the Teletubbies would look if they were on PCP instead of E. Link to MP4 video, about 10MB, via WFMU's "Beware of the Blog." (Thanks, Coop!)

Reader comment: Gaijin Biker says,

The weird octopus video is from a truly bizarre 1960's Japanese TV show called Kure Kure Takora, or "Gimme Gimme Octopus". Kind of the Japanese version of H.R. Puffnstuff. Link has lots more info.

Here's more info. My Japanese friends tell me it's equally bizarre even if you do speak the language!

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Robots, Wireless

We're pretty picky about the concept products that we bring you, and we're especially wary of anything that appears hand-drawn, but South Korean inventor Eungsang Park's claimant to the AIBO

Surveillance in the Internet of Things

"I was recently asked to consider how the new surveillance is (or might) operate in the era of networked Things. It's not a hard one to think through, but I reflected upon the role that visual surveillance has played in reshaping and refashioning physical space and thought maybe visual surveillance doesn't matter so much any more. Video surveillance was once all about "the man" having more power to see and reveal than those who were being watched. It was easy to grow wary of video cameras and their use, particularly by private entities whose cameras captured activity in public space, especially when there are no formal accountability protocols. I could get hopped up about that, certainly. I spent a day with the Institute for Applied Autonomy back several years ago, helping map out surveillance cameras in Manhattan as part of a wonderful exhibition that Eyebeam put on called We Love New York. It was about mapping the ways in which public space becomes a space that surveilled in a problematic way. It's too secret, this surveillance.

Log files and Arphids are what we have to worry about, not video surveillance. In the Internet of Things, it's a web hit in an access log that'll send you to the big house. Continue reading Society of the Spectacle (2.0): Surveillance in the Internet of Things by Julian Bleecker.

Government-backed research institute Riken said the 158-centimeter (five-foot) RI-MAN humanoid can already carry a doll weighing 12 kilograms (26 pounds) and could be capable of bearing 70 kilograms within five years. (AFP)

Your boring day might be exciting to someone half a world away. At least that's the premise of Your Normal Day, a collaborative project whereby users across the world can contribute a photographic diary of their daily lives. So far, you can peruse quotidian details like the feeding of Nico the dog in Buenos Aires and slipping on a pair of All-Stars in Gold Coast, Australia.

This looked really cool!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, GPS, Wearables, Wireless

We couldn't really call ourselves Engadget without faithfully bringing you every wearable computer that we spot, so we feel that it's our duty to show you the Eurotech WWPC (wrist-worn PC) for Dick Tracy-like Linux or Windows CE action- even though it is merely a concept for now. Obviously designed for jobsite use and not to please the fashionista set, the WWPC features (in someone's imagination, at least) WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a 3.5-inch TFT touchscreen, 64MB RAM/32MB ROM/SD slot for expansion, as well as an unspecified "low-power CPU." Of course you also get built-in speakers and wireless headset support, so your employer can chew you out after GPS narcs you out for those daily three-hour "siestas" behind the warehouse, and an eight-hour battery life from dual 2-cell Li-polymer rechargeable batteries, that should last most of your shift. Since this is just a speculative project for now, we'd also like to speculate and guess that these toys should start appearing on the shelves next month for under $100.

[Via LinuxDevices and Slashdot

Masticator, developed by Takehito Etani, is a headgear that gives audio visual feedback of chewing during meals. At each chew the device beeps and counts the chewing on the LED digital display. The number loops between 0 to 9 and does not add up.

One who wears it is also called "The Masticator". The Masticator occasionally visits restaurants such as McDonald's to chew slowly on hamburgers and fries in ritualistic manner.

Sensing of the mastication was achieved by a technology called MAST-I (Mastication Activated Switch Technology version one). The system takes advantage of the phenomenon that the masseter muscle at the sides of the jaw stiffens and pops out as the upper and lower teeths bit at each mastication. A push-button switch is placed on the masseter muscle and the muscle pushes the button when the teeth bite.

The device was inspired by the "great Masticator" himself: Horace Fletcher, a British health-food faddist of the Victorian era who argued that food should be chewed thirty two times -- or, about 100 times per minute -- before being swallowed. He sought for social reform by using the careful super mastication technique to solve urban social problems like poverty, sickness, and crime.

Enjoy the videos: the device and at the fast food restaurant.

Somewhat similar: the Meat Helmet.

Santiago Sierra is known for his provocative performances, which have included paying refugees from Chechenia to remain inside cardboardboxes, giving money to young Cubans for the priviledge of tattooing their backs, dying the hair of Africans blonde to make them look European, and spraying 10 Iraqis immigrant workers with insulating foam. But the Spanish artist provoked outrage among Jewish groups in Germany yesterday with his latest installation - a homemade gas chamber set up in a former synagogue.

The artist has parked six cars outside the synagogue and attached their exhaust pipes to the building using plastic tubes. It is then filled with deadly gas. Visitors are invited to go inside one by one wearing a gas mask, escorted by a firefighter. Before being allowed in, they have to sign a disclaimer stating they realise the room is full of carbon monoxide.

The project opened to the public on Sunday, creating huge queues, and runs until the end of April.

Sierra says the installation - entitled 245 cubic metres - is a protest against the "banalisation of the Holocaust".

However, Jewish leaders in Germany are furious. They described the installation in the Pulheim as "an abuse of artistic freedom".

Via trendbeheer < The Guardian. Images Netzeitung and The Guardian. Photo gallery in Der Spiegel.

This Thursday, March 16 at 7pm I will be presenting the souped-up 7 minute version of "Joywar" on a panel with Siva Vaidhyanathan, (author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity), Carrie McLaren (Stay Free! Magazine) and others in conjunction with:

Illegal Art
Art + Culture Center of Hollywood, FL
Feb. 4 - April 2, 2006
Curated by Carrie McClaren, editor of Stay Free! Magazine

Participating artists include Eric Doeringer, Tom Forsythe, David Byrne & Danielle Spencer, and others...

Illegal Art is a multi-media exhibition celebrating what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, but is now being used to stifle it. Loaded with gray areas, this exhibition explores whether intellectual property laws discourage the creation of new works and provokes the questions: Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and intellectual property law collide? What is art's future if the current laws are allowed to stand?