PUBLIC MARKS with search usual,customaryandreasonablecharges(ucr)

Lachine residents and friends sing out a protest song to Montreal Westers to help them understand the dangers they are imposing on neighboring families.The battle over a Devil's Hill street -- officially known as Broughton Road in Montreal West and as Des Érables in Lachine -- has raged for almost two decades. But on October 5, 2010, Montreal West erected a raised platform topped by bollards, cutting off emergency evacuation route for the hundreds of people living on the opposite side of the street in Lachine. SIM (Montreal's Fire Services) and the SVPM (Montreal police have publicly stated their opposition to the structure : it slows ambulance and fire services, endangers firefighters and their equipment and cuts off one of only two emergency evacuation routes for residents living near freight train lines. A 2002 independant study found no usual high traffic on the street and recommended against closing it off. Lachine residents appeal to Montreal Westers to "Take the barricade down!"Song composed by Pat Schmidt, ©2010

Nov 27, 2010

karl said...

You said: "URIs have become part of the furniture of the real world, like corporate graffiti tags. I'm typing this on a tube train and every poster at this end of the carriage features a URI in some shape."The metaphor is a little bit off. Basically yes you are right in the physical world (everything is real, the difference is more digital-physical), things change too. The poster in the carriage is content (aka the representation served to you), but this is not the URI. The URI in the carriage in this case is the pointer which led to this poster. It could be for example "carriage XZ345-window AXV" This is the identifier, the URI. The content can change it is no issue. Now the URI helps you to designate and draws an expectation, at this URI, I'm used to read this or that. Example in the physical world. At this address, 123 Smith Street, etc. (URI = identifier), there is a shop (representation) which sells bread. Maybe one day the shop will be replaced by a fisher place and you break the expectation of the usual person coming here. You break URIs when you do not handle it anymore. Exemple an urban architect redesign the city, and the street completely disappears, where one day the street was here, the next year no more than a big factory on what was one day a street. The important is not that the street disappeared, but that the name of the street disappeared. The History books of the city or the streets around could display a 410 Gone (Here was Smith Street).

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

And of course he has triggered the usual bunch of complaints about it. Tools are too technical, stuff is presented by geeks for geeks, data are boring, we need betteer user interfaces etc. Among many smart but technical proposals, basically adding to the general complexity issue they are supposed to solve, I will pick up this very simple one by Karl Dubost.

ACTION : Tell a story to people

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