Citizens connect!

This week I would like to take a look at a couple of technological and social systems that use Apps and are designed to improve urban living in cities. If you have ever asked yourself how technology can improve our lives then the following might be of interest to you.

The first thing I would like to look at is called Citizens Connect, a system that operates in Boston in the USA (where I currently live). According to the website “Citizens Connect enables real-time collaboration with citizens, “deputizing” mobile users to become the city’s eyes and ears. Citizens report potholes, graffiti, and other issues from anywhere in the city using their mobile phone”

And this is how it works, and it is a simple system if you have a reasonably good mobile phone. While walking or driving through the city you see something that you feel should be reported to the City Council, an abandoned car, vomit on the pavement, water gushing from a hole in the road, cat stuck up a tree, that kind of thing. You take a photo of it, upload it on the City of Boston website, they show it on a public map and (hopefully) send somebody out to fix the problem.

A map showing reported problems on Citizens Connect

I personally believe that a person is much more likely to report something if they can take a photo and send it off in real time than if they have to go home, look up a phone number and make a call. Could this be a fist step in making the citizen and the state more communicative and more responsible?

The City of Boston also offers another App called Street Bump. This is even simpler to use, you download it into your phone and it monitors your movement as you drive round the city. When you near a hole in the road you slow down, as does everyone else passing that spot, and this information is used to determine the quality of the road surface.

If you think your local council should try such a scheme, you can direct them towards Click Fix, a commercial system that is currently on sale and operated by several cities and other organizations. This is not a recommendation however, but their work does look very interesting.

Next week I will continue this theme with a look at an interesting university course all about “Urban Cybernetics” that is run at Harvard University. Some of the projects may offer great things for the future.

BitTorrent Monitoring Report

On Tuesday the web was overrun with reports that BitTorrent users are being monitored by a host of different (and in some cases unknown) organizations. I would like to take a quick look at the actual document that spawned these headlines.

BitTorrent logoThe news is takes from a paper presented this week at the SecureComm conference in Italy by Tom Chothia and colleagues at the University of Birmingham.

The paper is free to read here.

All alarmism aside the paper looks at both indirect and direct monitoring techniques, the indirect being the type that is typically used to “catch” people who are illegally downloading films, music and other copyrighted materials, and the more expensive but precise direct means that various companies are employing.

In the paper the authors state that their contribution to the argument can be summed up as follows:

We determine that indirect monitoring is still in use against BitTorrent users and devise more effective techniques to detect peers engaging in it;

We find indications that certain entities engage in direct monitoring of BitTorrent users and provide features to detect such peers;

We also notice that direct monitoring, in its current form, falls short of providing conclusive evidence of copyright infringement.

This is a complex and technical paper, but certain things are noteworthy. The direct monitoring consists in creating false peers that connect to your IP address and monitor its use, be that downloading updates for Linux or watching War Horse.

A user is much more likely to be directly monitored if they are partaking in one of the top 100 objects for download, and in 40% of cases monitoring began within 3 hours of connection. The less popular the object for download, the longer it takes to become monitored. This suggests that those doing the monitoring (be they copyright authorities or private data collecting companies) spend more resources on popular downloads.

One thing I can take from this paper is that somebody is collecting an awful lot of data about a lot of people and their downloading habits, and I wonder why? And also what do they intend to do with it? Particularly as many lawyers deem the data collected as not strong enough evidence to use in a court of law.

Fun With Faces

If you are looking for a little light entertainment on the web this week I may have a couple of sites for you. Both are related to the way you look, and at how others look at you, and you can participate too.

The first site is called All Look Same. The site contains a type of quiz. You are shown photos of people, places, art etc and you have to decide whether they are from China, Japan of Korea. At the end of the test you are given your result with the appropriate advice regarding learning about other cultures.

The exam room contains 8 different categories, from food to architecture, urban scenery, traditional architecture and modern art, but the really fun one is faces. Can you tell the difference between a Japanese face and that of a person from Korea? Take the test to find out.

Korean, Japanese or Chinese?

Korean, Japanese or Chinese?

There are also a couple of sections of holiday photos that really give a run out to your perception neurons.

The second website is somewhat related as it too deals with faces. The Facity site grew out of a project based in Berlin and Tel Aviv, and now covers a multitude of cities. The idea is simple, a series of photos of faces from an individual city, so why not play a game with your friends, show them a page of faces and try to guess the city.

First you can play with your friends, and then why not participate? There are specifications for the photos but the only rule about joining in is that you must live in the city in question, and there are already 100 cities involved.

The list of cities is interesting because it really shows how communication takes place. The faces tend to be clustered, as I presume groups of friends get together and take the photos and then upload them. Milan has hundreds, as do Berlin and Istanbul, but London only has one, miles behind the mighty city of Robbinsville in New Jersey and Targu Mures in Romania.

Faces of women

Average faces for women around the world

Check out the average face section too, as in the photo above of average women’s faces created through a process of comparing single points in many photos, an interesting project I would say.

So why not add your own? Tell them that Technology Bloggers sent you.