PUBLIC MARKS with search citizens

A good news drone story for a change. Showing once again just how useful simple platforms can be for aquiring imagery. Every environmental department really ought to have one.

 This is a small city somewhere in East Germany. Its citizens abandoned it long ago and these are just tourists who sometimes come visit this place…

P2P (peer-to-peer) Occupation studies the propagation of a 'shadow' Wi-Fi network that circumvents official telecommunication networks to offer a safe and public internet for citizens. Such an occupation works by introducing existing software that converts existing telecommunication devices into Wi-Fi access nodes.

“Strategies for Public Occupation” which invited submissions from architects, artists and citizens at large to offer their ideas for enabling acts of communication and action between the civil society and the structures of economic and political power. Gathering expertise from the various acts of civil occupation throughout the world during the last months

But with so many government, non-government and research organizations with overlapping but frequently competing agendas producing so much data, the task to break through a wall of numbers becomes even harder. For citizens across the world it is challenging to select what information matters and what doesn’t, especially when there are corporate and media forces attempting to distract us from the most critical knowledge.

The FSB has set new goals: the emphasis is now on identifying individuals and building up a database of high quality video images of Russian citizens. The new CCTV systems will incorporate digital cameras with facilities for ‘intelligent video’, in other words, where the video surveillance system automatically performs an analysis of the captured video and compares it with images held in a database.

Visa Restrictions Index is a global ranking of countries according to travel freedom their citizens enjoy.

About 146,200 more people died than were born during the year, another sobering record high, for the fourth straight year. The spread of people is also increasingly becoming concentrated in cities as economically struggling rural towns and villages empty. A little over 90% of citizens reside in cities. Indeed, there are more people who reside in Tokyo’s concrete jungle alone, about 12.66 million people, than all of the small towns across the country combined (11.86 million), according to the ministry numbers.

The ruling would imply that the City must either change the bylaw that currently prohibits postering on public street furniture, or supply a vast quantity of dedicated places for citizens to place public notices.

U.S. government-produced film defending the World War II internment of Japanese American citizens.

Today the forced relocation of 120,000 innocent U.S. citizens to camps in seven states of the American West has been condemned as immoral and unconstitutional. In 1988 the federal government paid restitution to survivors and issued an apology, while official reports acknowledged that the policy arose from racism and irrational fear.

Seoul is one of the world’s most wired city, and the recent “ubiquitous city” project aims to increase the level of connectivity citizens experience on the street. One of the most visible part of the u-city is the media poles forest, tenth of computers embedded into high poles offering services like news, submay and bus maps, email postcard, 3D avatar game, casual games, shopping/restaurant locator and Flickr photo gallery (more). This sort of rich country’s version of the hole in the wall is extremely popular, and many couples and groups gather around the screens to share a moment playing games or sending a postcard.

Brian House and Jesse Shapins were two of the co-creators of Yellow Arrow, an early locative media arts project and social software platform. In summer 2008, they co-taught the studio/seminar “Critical Urban Media Arts” at Columbia. Here, they discuss the conceptual background of the course and the pedagogical methods they developed, including Periplurban, a new platform for urban media research.

The 5th Montreal Citizen Summit is a social forum open to all and is based on the concept “The City We Want”. This event will take place from June 5-7, 2009 at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and will be an opportunity for citizens and civil society practitioners to strengthen their ties in order to collectively organise social action initiatives. The Summit will also be the opportunity for citizens to learn and exchange on urban issues related to this year's themes: 1) Economy 2) Urban planning 3) Social justice, inclusion and citizenship 4) Environment 5) Democracy 6) Culture.

The aim of the Data Protection Day is to give European citizens the chance to understand what personal data is collected and processed about them and why, and what their rights are with respect to this processing.