Headline July 02, 2014

''' O'' STUDENTS - O"' HEROES ! : 

ONE TRILLION DOLLAR 

OPPORTUNIT​Y '''

!WOW! :  One Short Toot and an equation from the equator. 

Not so long ago, I had honoured and asked this host country  -the province of KPK in particular,  -the policy makers and the academics in general-,  to set up an IDE scoping the entire province.

This request in particular had come from the KPK students : "Let's detail in a reasonable time span, in the public domain, what the heck is happening?"

"Ahoy," I swooned,.... "Thar, but a  DNA of an intelligent province, O'heroes!"

But this world, O" Imran Khan, is just so damn and darn deferred. 

And now to the post:

'' THE TECHNOLOGY GIANTS building smart cities are mostly paying attention to technology, and not people......ignoring the creative process of harnessing technology at the grass roots,'' :

Writes Anthony Townsend of  New York University in his forthcoming book, '' Smart Cities : Big Data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia''. But the two sides need not necessarily be opposed.

From the top-down point of view, one of the main attractions of gathering and using data about cities is  ''flattening the urban peaks'',  in the words of David Gann of Imperial College in London, who chairs a board set up:

To develop ideas for making Britain's capital work more cleverly. If a mixture of the right data and the right policies and interventions can make the morning traffic run more smoothly, or spread out the evening peak in energy use, cities should do more with less.

Engineers dream of digital nervous system that captures data from every nook and cranny from sewers, parking spaces, school thermostats, cameras designed to show how many windows have lights turned on behind them, and so on.

Powerful computers then crunch the data, optimise operations and tell the authorities about incipient problems.

It is a notion of control happily abetted by the technology companies that want to sell components and services; 

''Unlocking a one trillion dollar opportunity'' was the tagline of a smart-city workshop in Singapore earlier this year.

Proponents claim that the right tools, properly hooked up, would allow a new level of integrated response. A fire alarm would not simply call out fire engines: it could determine their best route, redirect traffic away from it, warn downwind schools to close their windows-

And make sure there there were no nearby water mains shut down for maintenance. The strains of big events  -whether anticipated, like a sports festival, or unlooked for like a flood, -could be predicted and planned for. 

Some want to build the sort of data networks  necessary  for this into new cities from the start. With existing cities they need stuck on piecemeal. Stockholm and Singapore have developed sophisticated toll-road systems to mange traffic.

Barcelona, one of the few big cities to have a powerful chief information officer, had a plan for  ''intelligent''   lampposts along its avenues, starting with the Passeig de Gracia.

They will be able to spot things like like free parking spaces- queues in front of Museums, full-rubbish bins and even suspicious movements of people.

Although many such systems are supposed to work automatically, it is a rare smart-city project that does not aspire to a NASA style control filled with electronics, earnestness and a sense of the future.

In Rio de Janeiro, for instance, dozens of operators from 30 different departments sit in front of a wall of screens showing images from some of the 400 CCTV cameras placed throughout the city, as well as weather data and police reports.

This is how Rio is managing the World Cup. This is how Rio will manage the 2016 Olympics. Great work, by any measure!

From the bottom up view, control room is the smartphone.

Devices that know where they are have allowed enthusiasts to build all kinds of new applications such as Foursquare, an app which lets users signal their locations to friends.These come into their own in the dense social worlds of cities.

Both activists and political agendas and companies wanting to make money off services have been pestering city governments,  -among other bodies, to make more and more of their data available for all sorts of purposes, with smartphone apps in pride of place  

They have had some success. New York's NYC OpenData offers the public more than 1,000 sets of Data, from a list of requests to clean graffiti to results from health inspections.

The website of San Francisco, another  open-data pioneer, features dozens of apps, locating everything from parking spaces and playgrounds to registered sex-offenders. Such inventiveness is not restricted to rich countries.

A Bangalore start-up called  Mapunity is using data from street cameras, phone networks and city buses to provide drivers with timely traffic information.

Some cities hold  ''data dives''  at which activists and experts in analytic technique pour over data from diverse sources looking for fruitful new ways to combine them.

Others hold competitions,  like the one which commended  Makkie Klauwe.

But his enthusiasm has rarely, so far, translated into game-changing success: except in the area of public transport, few apps using open data have made the jump from interesting novelty to reliable consumer service.

The Honour and Serving of this Post continues. Thank you for reading. And follow the next one.

With caring and  respectful dedication to  "Student Makkie Klauwe/"  The Netherlands. And with best wishes for the football semis.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of  Brazil. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' The Honour At Your Side "'

Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless