1. Sensors everywhere really mean analytics everywhere.

"The company says that it provides e-commerce style metrics for brick-and-mortar stores using sensors that track the physical activity of actual human shoppers. It counts 140 companies in 40 different countries as its customers, and says it is adding 400 to 1,000 new stores to its analysis every month. So far it has installed 65,000 sensors around the world, which it claims enable it to track over 1 billion human shoppers every year. The sensors include video cameras, point-of-sale systems, payment cards, weather sensors, and even guest Wi-Fi networks. So the next time you log into that coffee shop’s free Wi-Fi, just remember: It may be logging your presence in order to help the shop figure out how to sell you more lattes."

2. Citizenship, freedom, software, law, and art.

"Citizenship is the right to have rights, and our attitude to citizenship, as states and individuals, defines and produces our attitude to other human beings. As we accelerate into the 21st century and the third millennium, citizenship, or the lack thereof, is going to be one of the defining issues. Look at the increasing ethnic and religious fractures of post-Imperial and post-Soviet nation-states, the coming age of sea-level rises and inevitable climate-change refugee crises, the rise of pan-global financial elites, and the increasing individual identification not with the nation-state but with digital space and corporate cloud-services. The cloud renders geography irrelevant—until you realize that everything that matters, everything that means you don’t die, is based not only on which passport you possess, but also on a complex web of definitions of what constitutes that passport. In the new battles over citizenship, those definitions are constantly under attack."

+ First in a series of Artist Op-Eds, hosted by the awesome Walker Art Museum.

3. The skunk is right enjoying the ecological niches now present in our (sub)urban landscapes.

"We are colliding with them, and they are colliding with us. 'We’re spreading out more,' says Jerry Dragoo, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, who has spent his career researching skunks. 'I get a lot of calls from rural areas, but I get them from the middle of towns as well. Concrete. Pavement. We have encroached on a lot of their habitat, but they’re very adaptable. They do well in human habitats. We provide them with food, water, and shelter. They’ll eat just about anything. If you feed your dog or cat outside, they’ll take advantage of that. They move in under sheds and things.'"

4. How wireless cryptography was born.

"The wireless telegraph station in Sayville, New York was one of the most powerful in the world. Constructed by the German company Telefunken in 1912, it served as a transatlantic relay point for diplomatic messages and business communications. It was a beacon among amateur wireless enthusiasts around the United States who could tune their home-made sets to the station’s nightly press dispatches. All of this changed when one of those amateurs uncovered the station’s true purpose. The Navy seized the station in 1915 on suspicion of relaying covert commands from the German Empire to U-Boats in the Atlantic, and a congressional bill was introduced to ban all civilian wireless activities from the airwaves."

5. Selfies at Auschwitz, a historical archaeologist's take.

"The heart of selfie photography in historic sites is perhaps personal imagination; it is less what we look like—and what a historical site 'really means'—than it is about what we imagine we look like and what a historical site means.  One of Thurnell-Read’s subjects touring Auschwitz focused on imagination and said he 'liked that it was underdeveloped, the fact that it was in ruins, again, the faculty of mind, it helps, because you had to conjure up images yourself which made you think more.' Historical selfies certainly harbor some normative ideological effects ranging from visual representation of the self to the guise of attractiveness that shapes how many people view selfies, and in some spaces we may expect some codes of dignity.  Nevertheless, historical selfies simultaneously reflect a telling if idiosyncratic effort to visualize and give meaning to a personal tourist experience."

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

campus. In Roman antiq., an open field for military exercises &c. Used for the grounds of a college or school, US.

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The Cloud Renders Geography Irrelevant—Until You Realize