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

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

“A taxonomy of transition“, (2009) by radical cartographer Bill Rankin is a visual essay on how racial boundaries mark the neighborhoods of a city like Chicago, “where the delimitation of (…) official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology.”

This work uses dot mapping to show populations (Red/Purple is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people), hence describing three kinds of urban transitions: stark and precise boundaries, transitions and gradients, gaps.

This project was originally published as an essay in the Spring 2010 issue of Perspecta, the journal of the Yale School of Architecture.

In 2011 it won the MiniMax mapping contest at the “Moving Maps” cartographic biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Astounded by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago‘s racial and ethnic divides (above), Eric Fisher tried the same kind of mapping on 40 American cities. See here his “Race and Ethnicity” photoset, particularly because high definition images allow an for a better vision of the transitions.

Washingron D.C.: a strong separation between East and West;

Detroit: 8 mile beltway, providing a boundary for Black and White populations;

San Francisco Bay: white predominance over Northern side of the city, while relatively better integration on other sectors of the Bay;

New York: extreme racial segregation, increased by massive density. Possible cross-cultural ferment on boundaries;







LA: low density allows for blending neighborhoods;

San Antonio: even integration between white and hispanic populations.

Via: FastCo Design

Many years before the Cylindre Sonore, (see previous post), in 1969, Leitner began his research on sound defined space.
A room composed of 64 loudspeakers, the Soundcube allowed for the sounds to travel from one side to another, circling, spiraling, changing in pitch and direction.

Despite living in Paris since 2007 and regularly enjoying a walk in the Park de la Villette, we honestly never happened to find a little sound pavillion embedded in one of the thematic gardens of the park. Le Cylindre Sonore, a public art installation by Bernard Leitner, was realized in 1987 and is one of the few built architectural works by the Austrian architect and composer.

Active since the 60′s, Leitner’s work always focused on the relationships between sound and space, or better “sound as building material” as the title of one of his retrospective exhibitions.
Unlike architectural walls, sound is not an elementary medium for the definition of limits, and the separation of the interior from the exterior, yet is not a blurred, totally undefined entity, insofar it is able to create unseeable walls and define invisible spaces.

Partially hidden from the bamboos, Le Cylindre Sonore stands with his concrete double walls in a lower level respect of the bordering alleys, as an excavated hole voluntary delimiting the rest of the park. Once descended with a long staircase, one can experience a contemplative listening in a true resonating chamber, potentiated by three loudspeakers hidden behind eight perforated concrete walls. Water rivets increase the detail and help separating this place from the sides.

Through subtly orchestrated reverberations, high pitched or filled sounds, spaces are constantly recreated. Soft pricklings in a dialogue with the robustness of concrete walls.

Images courtesy Bernhard Leitner and Archdaily.