Wi-Fi goes through walls, but it isn’t so great at getting through human bodies. Based in this piece of knowledge, a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has built a detector that can see people through walls using Wi-Fi signals. It can recognize individuals and can even track the movement of their limbs with spooky accuracy. — Fast Company
If you've been trying to duck the information age by keeping a low online profile, not getting a smartphone, or even living off the grid, you are now officially out of luck: your body itself is a source of information thanks to its relative impenetrability by WiFi signals. Although it's a blow for... View full entry
Dr. Gerald Brett Weiss ... was killed when he was hit from behind while riding his bicycle in the community of Indian Wells, CA. [...]
his family won a $5.8 million judgment against Indian Wells, claiming that the city was negligent in not providing sufficient width for bike lanes or lighting [...]
California is one of thirteen states that follows the Pure Comparative Fault Rule, meaning that even if the city is only partially at fault—even only one percent—the plaintiff can recover damages.
— ssti.us
Weiss was hit from behind by an allegedly drunk driver in June of 2012, on a road that, previous to a redesign in 2005, had been marked as a bike route and had bike lanes.More news on cycling design and safety:Senator proposes mandatory helmets for California cyclistsProtected bike lanes... View full entry
Canada's national theme for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale will be a multimedia investigation of the country's resource extraction industry, as announced earlier this week by the Canada Council for the Arts. Titled "Extraction", the project profiles and "radically rethinks" Canada's rise as... View full entry
Exhibiting architecture is a notoriously difficult and contentious task. After all, how do you represent a spatial practice without neglecting the very qualities that made it worth representing in the first place? Nonetheless, it has a long history – extending at least as far back as the... View full entry
If architecture is the ultimate fourth dimensional experience, then “Architectural Guide China” by Evan Chakroff, Addison Godel and Jacqueline Gargus is a remarkable fourth dimensional tour guide. It encapsulates not only the physical attributes and detailed locations of architecture in China... View full entry
After a decade of outlandish proposals for the City, Parry has come up with a refreshingly blunt stick of a building for the centrepiece of the district’s “cluster” of office blocks. [...]
“The thing that’s most interesting in all this is urban design,” says Parry, deflecting the discussion away from the fact that he is penning the City’s tallest totem. He’s more concerned with fixing the human experience at street level: “The project is really all about public space.”
— theguardian.com
Soon to join the "great dinner party in the sky," between Rogers Strik Harbour + Partners' Cheesegrater and Foster + Partners' Gherkin, 1 Undershaft will be as tall as The Shard (the maximum height limit for the city). According to The Guardian, the building was also designed to have a triangular... View full entry
The [British] museum announced a six-month show that will tell the remarkable story of two lost cities at the mouth of the Nile – Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus – which by the 8th-century AD had been swallowed completely by the sea. [...]
the loans will range from the enormous, a 5.4-metre-high granite statue of the Nile flood god Hapi, to the domestic. [...]
It represents Egypt’s first major loan of antiquities since the country’s revolution in 2011...
— theguardian.com
A red alert should go into effect if there is a prediction that the air quality index will stay above 200 for more than 72 hours. The United States government rates above 200 as “very unhealthy,” and 301 to 500 as “hazardous.” At 7 p.m. Monday, the Beijing municipal reading was 253. [...]
At international climate change talks, including the ones now underway in Paris, Chinese officials have promised to curb coal use in order to address both air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
— nytimes.com
More from Beijing:Beijing's challenges to become the center of Jing-Jin-Ji — a supercity of 130 million peopleThe tiny village library that draws Beijingers in drovesBeijing mayor says air pollution makes his city "unlivable"China considering drastic ban on coal View full entry
FIU is now considering a merger between its journalism school and College of Architecture + The Arts. The new combined college would probably get a new name (such as adding “communications” somewhere in the title), and journalism would continue as a “school” within this larger umbrella college. Journalism would still be an available degree track, as would the school’s other offerings in broadcast media, public relations, and advertising. — Miami Herald
archaeologists have found several recesses in rock formations in Wales that match the size and shape of Stonehenge's bluestones, leading to theories that the monument may have been erected in Wales first, before being moved to its present site in Salisbury Plain.
The researchers also discovered evidence of what they described as “a loading bay" from where the massive boulders could have been dragged away.
— artnet.com
Wales is over 130 miles / 209 kilometers from Stonehenge's current site in Salisbury Plain – a distance that would have taken Neolithic people over 500 years to transport the monoliths over, according to Professor Mike Parker Pearson, a British late prehistory professor at UCL who led the... View full entry
The first permanent publicly-viewable artwork by Refik Anadol, a media artist known for his immersive, site-specific light installations, was recently unveiled in San Francisco. Virtual Depictions: San Francisco, a series of "data sculptures" based on a publicly-available dataset, occupies a... View full entry
Before coming to MIT to serve as dean of the School of Architecture + Planning in January 2015, Hashim Sarkis taught at Harvard's GSD as the Aga Khan professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies. He founded his own practice, Hashim Sarkis Studios, in Cambridge in 1998, and... View full entry
The 18 members of London-based Assemble were named winners of the 31st Turner prize on Monday night, receiving their £25,000 prize from the Sonic Youth co-founder and artist Kim Gordon at an awards dinner broadcast live on Channel 4 from Tramway, Glasgow.
Assemble are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense of the word, to win the prize. They were nominated for their work tackling urban dereliction in Toxteth, Liverpool...
— The Guardian
Assemble, the architecture-ish collective known for their direct action urban interventions, has just won the prestigious Turner Prize. Working "across the fields of art, architecture and design," they are the first non-artists, in the strictest sense, to win the prize, and the first whose work... View full entry
According to leaked documents France's Ministry of Interior is considering two new proposals: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.
The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. These proposals are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered.
— Ars Technica
According to the report published by Le Monde, the French Ministry of Interior has developed two frightening new security proposals that may be presented to parliament early next years.The first, as reported by Ars Technica, would block free, public WiFi during a state of emergency. On November... View full entry
Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image? — Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune
In his column, Kamin scrutinizes the recent awarding of an honor award to El Centro, a building designed by Juan Moreno, by the Chicago branch of the AIA. Apparently, the architects provided the jurors with a photoshopped image of the building, notably erasing the clunky air circulation machines... View full entry