Franchise Freedom. An Aerial Sculpture by Studio Drift “Franchise Freedom - a flying sculpture by Studio Drift is a performative artwork at the interface between technology, science, and art. An autonomous flying swarm of hundreds of drones,...
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Franchise Freedom. An Aerial Sculpture by Studio Drift

Franchise Freedom - a flying sculpture by Studio Drift is a performative artwork at the interface between technology, science, and art. An autonomous flying swarm of hundreds of drones, Franchise Freedom exposes the tension between individual freedom and safety in numbers. Music composed and played by Joep Beving.

The artwork translates into a poetic illustration of how we, as humans, strive to live autonomously within societies defined by rules and conventions. Although the patterns appear random, and the impression of such a swarm may remind us of freedom, the behavior of these birds is completely orchestrated and subject to many rules and survival instincts. There is a tremendous beauty in watching these sudden decisions of thousands of individuals and their reactions to one another. If every bird were to operate on its own, complete chaos would be the result. Just like birds, people find safety in a group, while at the same time they are forced to act according to a set of rules on which society functions. One who chooses complete individual freedom above these rules is forced to operate outside of society. What is the perfect balance between the two? Is freedom an illusion?

To create Franchise Freedom, Studio Drift studied the natural flight patterns of starlings and translated them into software that has been specially developed and embedded in the drones. This research started in 2007 with the launch of our work Flylight, whereby non pre-programmed flight patterns are generated by an algorithm that reacts in ways similar to starling murmuration. Together with their unique movements, light plays an equally important role in Franchise Freedom. Each drone has a light source, and its intensity and color is influenced by the distance between it and other drones, emphasizing the density of the group.

The parameters in the algorithm used in Franchise Freedom are choreographed by the artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta in order to channel the emotional impact of the performance, but they can never exactly predict or determine how the drones will behave. Their technology is based on ongoing university research on ocking behavior, as the principles of self-organization have become more and more relevant in our ever changing world.

Source: Studio Drift

New Study Shows that Swarming is Superior to Voting “A new study published by Unanimous AI finds that groups reach optimal decisions at significantly higher rates using Swarm Technology than by traditional voting Today, Unanimous AI published a study...
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New Study Shows that Swarming is Superior to Voting

A new study published by Unanimous AI finds that groups reach optimal decisions at significantly higher rates using Swarm Technology than by traditional voting

Today, Unanimous AI published a study concluding that groups are significantly more effective at reaching optimal decisions when deliberating as online “swarms” as compared to using traditional voting methods. The new study, entitled “Artificial Swarms Find Social Optima,” compares groups connected by Swarm AI technology to groups using three common voting methods (Plurality Vote, Ranked Voting, and Pairwise Voting) and finds that swarming enables groups to reach optimal decisions 36% more often than when taking a traditional vote.

Inspired by the remarkable abilities of schooling fish, flocking birds, and swarming bees to converge on optimal decisions, Swarm AI technology enables human teams to form similar systems online.   Prior research has shown that swarming can amplify the intelligence of networked groups, enabling teams to make significantly more accurate predictions, forecasts, and estimation.  This new study is the first to show that groups working as online swarms can reach optimal decisions as well.

“Conducting votes and polls has been the cornerstone of group decision-making for hundreds of years, but it often leads to outcomes that do not represent the collective interests of the population,” says Dr. Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous AI. “This new research suggests there is a better way for groups to reach effective decisions, and it’s rooted in a far deeper history – evolution – which has empowered other social species to form systems that converge on decisions in unison.”

This research falls in the field of Social Choice Theory, which studies how groups with conflicting interests can reach decisions that optimize the welfare of populations. In the 18th century, Nicolas de Condorcet observed that even if individual voters are all rational, plurality voting can lead to irrational outcomes. In response, many alternate voting methodologies were developed, including ranked voting and pairwise voting, also known as Borda Count and the Condorcet Method. Each of these methods has their strengths, but all fail to reach optimal decisions at significant rates.

Source: unanimous.ai

The Art of Flying Captures the Shape-Shifting Wonder of a Murmuration of Starlings “A murmuration is the intricately choreographed movements of a large flock of starlings as they swoop through the sky. The phenomena appears like an undulating cloud,...
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The Art of Flying Captures the Shape-Shifting Wonder of a Murmuration of Starlings

A murmuration is the intricately choreographed movements of a large flock of starlings as they swoop through the sky. The phenomena appears like an undulating cloud, quickly shifting directions, density and shape as it traverses overhead. Due to a relatively warm winter in the Netherlands between 2014 and 2015, many starlings stayed in the country rather than migrating south. Filmmaker Jan van IJken captured one such air show in his short film The Art of Flying, which can be watched in full on his website. Watch the condensed version above to observe the fluidity of the birds’ movements, as well as listen to the soothing sound of the flock’s flapping wings. (via Laughing Squid)

Source: Colossal

Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion “Peter Calthorpe thinks Silicon Valley has it all wrong. He rejects the ideas of tech industry visionaries who say personal autonomous vehicles will soon be the solution to urban problems...
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Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion

Peter Calthorpe thinks Silicon Valley has it all wrong. He rejects the ideas of tech industry visionaries who say personal autonomous vehicles will soon be the solution to urban problems like traffic congestion.

Mr. Calthorpe is a Berkeley-based urban planner who is one of the creators of New Urbanism, which promotes mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. His designs emphasize the proximity of housing, shopping and public space.

He is not opposed to autonomous vehicles. Mr. Calthorpe’s quarrel is with the idea that the widespread adoption of personally owned self-driving cars will solve transportation problems. In fact, he worries it will lead to more urban congestion and suburban sprawl.

“One thing is certain: Zero- or single-occupant vehicles,” even ones that can drive themselves, “are a bad thing,” he and the transportation planner Jerry Walters wrote in an article last year in Urban Land, an urban planning journal. “They cause congestion, eat up energy, exacerbate sprawl and emit more carbon per passenger-mile.”

Mr. Calthorpe believes that in trying to solve a very hard technical problem, Silicon Valley is ignoring an easier application for autonomous technology that has the potential to quickly change mass transit and help solve the Valley’s housing crisis. It starts with backing away from solo car trips.

A popular claim by the advocates of self-driving cars is that not only will they be safer than human-driven cars, but they will lead to fewer cars, faster commutes and a radical rethinking of cities where finding a place to park is no longer a priority.

But Mr. Calthorpe, citing a range of transportation studies, has simulated through computer models the impact of self-driving vehicles in urban settings. He argues that if they are used the way today’s vehicles are — carrying a single individual in most cases — they will lead to more congestion.

“The key distinction is the number of people per vehicle,” said Mr. Walters, a principal at Fehr & Peers, a transportation consultancy in Walnut Creek. “Without pretty radically increasing the number of people per vehicle, autonomous systems will increase total miles traveled.

”When it is easier to travel in a city in self-driving cars, Mr. Calthorpe said, everyone will want to do so. And when self-driving vehicles are more affordable — which could take years to happen — people who currently rely on public transit while running their errands will instead send their cars to pick up the groceries and the dry cleaning, adding significantly to what Mr. Walters and other urban planners call “total vehicle miles.” [Full article]

Source: The New York Times

Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries “Maps are hugely important tools in our everyday life, whether it’s guiding our journeys from point A to B, or shaping our big picture perceptions about geopolitics and the...
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Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries

Maps are hugely important tools in our everyday life, whether it’s guiding our journeys from point A to B, or shaping our big picture perceptions about geopolitics and the environment.

For many people, the Earth as they know it is heavily informed by the Mercator projection – a tool used for nautical navigation that eventually became the world’s most widely recognized map.
Mercator’s Rise to the Top

With any map projection style, the big challenge lies in depicting a spherical object as a 2D graphic. There are various trade-offs with any map style, and those trade-offs can vary depending on how the map is meant to be used.

In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome.

The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries – particularly in the case of the African continent.

Mercator’s map inadvertently also pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth’s surface, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%.

As the animated gif below – created by Reddit user, neilrkaye – demonstrates, northern nations such as Canada and Russia have been artifiically “pumped up” in the minds of many people around the world.

[…]

Google, whose map app is used by approximately 150 million people per month, recently took the bold step of overlaying their map onto a globe. This change sidesteps projection issues completely and displays the world as it actually is: round.

As people become more accustomed to equal area maps and seeing the Earth in its spherical form, misconceptions about the size of continents may become a thing of the past.

Source: visualcapitalist.com


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Originally posted by land-of-maps

New Methods in Urban Analysis and Simulation “ Documentation of teaching results from the autumn semester 2013 of the seminar New Methods in Urban Analysis and Simulation at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich ” Source:...
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New Methods in Urban Analysis and Simulation

Documentation of teaching results from the autumn semester 2013 of the seminar New Methods in Urban Analysis and Simulation at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich

Source: www.ia.arch.ethz.ch