socks-studio

What better ending to our five days in London (thanks Giulia and Florian for hosting us!) than to post a pair of videos of the city 50 years ago?

When the future wasn’t a threat, nostalgy was absent and the propaganda showed technology as a miracolous epiphany of man’s evolution.

Of the whole set of videos, we have chosen this one about the inner working of London’s brand new office complexes of the time: mechanised typing pool, air conditioning and heating, automated posting system, computer rooms!

And another one showing the construction of modern buildings, including the Barbican (still at the planning stage), Moor House, the Golden Lane Estate, etc.
Also notice the absence of whatsoever forms of workers’ safety measures at around 3 minutes 50″

Via: Things Magazine, Phil Gyphord

Marnehuizen is a Dutch false and uninhabited city included in the military camp of Marnewaard, near Groningen.

The city provides the army a stage to simulate future urban combats, emergencies and raids, and it consists of a number of streets, some dwellings, a section of railways with a train station, a bank, a supermarket, a warehouse and even a sewers systems. Europe prepares for what is already happening in Athens and what is probably going to happen again in metropolis under siege like London and Paris.

Marnhuizen represents all cities without being one and it appears strickingly similar to the scenario for Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. From the Funambulist‘s review:

“Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). (…) This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality.”

Jeroen Hofman collected his photographs of Marnhuizen in the book “Playground”
This work has been prefaced by Dr. Pieter van Vollenhoven, member of the Dutch Royal House and former military, which personally used to supervise emergencies simulations and was the chairman, until last year, of the Dutch Safety Board.

Via: Il Post

Edward McKnight Kauffer (14 December 1890 – 22 October 1954) was an influential American-born artist noted for his avant garde graphic design and poster art, especially in England.

Via: Imaging the future / hilarious, depressing or what?

Here’s how the territory of Palestine has shrinked and borders have fragmented from 1917 to present day. A cartographic essay on GOOD.
Thanks, Ethel, as usual.

Click the first image for a higher resolution:

Italian online newspaper Il Post publishes a report by a group of four Austrian researchers from Wien University, about an innovative statistical method to detect electoral frauds:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting:
Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen’s vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies certain statistical consequences for the polling results which can be used to identify election irregularities. Using a suitable data collapse, we find that vote distributions of elections with alleged fraud show a kurtosis of hundred times more than normal elections. As an example we show that reported irregularities in the 2011 Duma election are indeed well explained by systematic ballot stuffing and develop a parametric model quantifying to which extent fraudulent mechanisms are present. We show that if specific statistical properties are present in an election, the results do not represent the will of the people. We formulate a parametric test detecting these statistical properties in election results. For demonstration the model is also applied to election outcomes of several other countries.

Crossing the percentage of voters with the percentage of winning party’s voters, and analyzing the number of districts by color, Peter Klimek, Yuri Yegorov, Rudolf Hanel e Stefan Thurner traced a sort of poll’s fingerprint, and put into evidence suspect cases and irregularities.

Districts usually cluster around a given turnout and voting level. In Uganda and Russia these clusters are ’smeared out’ to the upper right region of the plots, reaching a second peak at a 100% turnout and a 100% of votes (red circles).

While the report is not of easy lecture if you’re not really into statistics, it shows an interesting use of science to uncover one of the most efficient yet hidden display of tyrannical power.

Read the full text pdf on arxiv.org.

Via: Il Post