The smartphone revolution comes with a hidden cost. A joint investigation by FRONTLINE and ProPublica explores the hazardous work of independent contractors who are building and servicing America’s expanding cellular infrastructure.

electricity pole, transmission towers, cable - universal icons crossing earth's surface; physical markers helped structure fundamental changes in everyday life - instant comm on global scale; equipment around which cities were built

transportation and telecom infrastructures caused both expansion and contraction

impact of sound transmission of urban theory - telecom engineering absorbed by modernist architects - Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright illustrated assimilation of modern tech landscape - management of suburban sprawl

Mumford: transportation (cars), communication (interpersonal comm -> telephone lines; "the telegraph symbolically follows the railroad..."; "radio is a potentially distributive and decentralizing agency...")

Wright: "all pole and wires overhead [will be] a bad memory of ugliness and danger"; "crude, utilitarian scaffolding...does violence to our own character..."

1890 NY: Bell started laying wire underground

Impressive growth for a company with 12 people. Database sharding is some sort of evil magic, isn't it?

White takes as his subject the data centers and technological infrastructure behind the finger swipes and pop-up notifications of contemporary life, capturing mechanistic environments such as the KSAT Svalbard Ground Station, theMcLaren Technology Centre, and the BMW MINI Factory. Each is rendered in minimalist compositions, white washed tableaux whose near depthless forms are made legible by shadow and line.

JOHN LORINC
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, May. 18, 2012

Rowland Caldwell Harris – who began a 33-year term as works commissioner a century ago this week – left his civic fingerprints all over Toronto, building hundreds of kilometres of sidewalks, sewers, paved roads, streetcar tracks, public baths and washrooms, landmark bridges and even the precursor plans to the GO commuter rail network.

“The significance of Harris a hundred years later is that we’re still living fundamentally in the city he imagined,” observes Dalhousie architecture professor Steven Mannell, who studies his career and has advised city officials on an extensive rehabilitation of the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, due to be finished next year.

Mr. Harris famously added a second deck to the Prince Edward Viaduct in anticipation of a subway line that wasn’t built for decades. What’s less well known is that Mr. Harris was a photo buff who, in 1930, presided over the city’s first planning exercise – a process that led to construction of congestion-easing arterials such as Dundas Street East and the parkway extension of Mount Pleasant through Rosedale and up towards St. Clair.

RT @dsearls: The Real Story of Send: #internet #infrastructure #history

Distributed build system and UI. Available as service.

"[DeAnna Stephens] quit using Facebook in December, deciding she was frittering away too much time reading about what her friends were eating for lunch. Then she realized that she had lost touch with 900 people.
'I couldn't believe how out of the loop I was on things in life,' Stephens said. Tired of being the last to hear about new jobs, new boyfriends and new babies, she signed up again 'simply to be back on the radar.' [...]

Two years after Quit Facebook Day, [Matthew Milan] says nearly every quitter he's spoken to has returned. [...]

One of Facebook's biggest advantages is that there's really no other place to go. Facebook is by far the world's largest digital gathering place, and since it vanquished onetime rival Myspace years ago, the only other contender has been Google+, the Mountain View, Calif., search giant's attempt at social networking. But it has had trouble capturing the public imagination — or regular users.

'It's so easy to quit something when there's an alternative,' said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. 'You can quit your health club and go to another one, or quit your job and find another one, but if you quit Facebook, where the heck do you go?'"

I enjoyed Google's "The Story of Send". All the infrastructure that makes it possible to send an email:

"To treat the city as a living art installation, or compare it to the neutral space of a research laboratory, is both to de-historicize & to depoliticize its experience. The informal economy of poverty celebrated by the Harvard team is the result of a specific set of policies pursued by Nigeria’s military dictatorships over the last decades under IMF & World Bank guidance, which decimated the metropolitan economy."

"Lagos provides ample evidence for Mike Davis’s contention that rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation & state retrenchment has been a ‘recipe for the mass production of slums’."

"The scale of the city, its extreme poverty & ethnic polarization now present real obstacles to rebuilding its social & physical fabric. Though informal networks & settlements may meet immediate needs for some, & determined forms of community organizing may produce measurable improvements, grassroots responses alone cannot coordinate the structural…"

Libraries used in the new Basecamp (Rails 3.2)

The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) will be the first of its kind, in scale and scope, fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies....

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

CITE will be modeled after a mid-sized modern American city, integrating real-world urban and suburban environments along with all the typical working infrastructure elements that make up today’s cities. This will provide customers the unique opportunity to test and evaluate technologies in conditions that most closely simulate real-world applications.