PUBLIC MARKS with search ecology

Python module allowing easy use of Google Language Tools, involving language detection and translation, with transliteration in an experimental state

We live with a lot of stuff. The average kitchen, for example, is home to stuff galore, and every appliance, every utensil, every thing, is compound—composed of tens, hundreds, even thousands of other things. Although each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it also creates the need for even more stuff: cereal demands a spoon; a television demands a remote. Rich Gold calls this dense, knotted ecology of human-made stuff the "Plenitude." And in this book—at once cartoon treatise, autobiographical reflection, and practical essay in moral philosophy—he tells us how to understand and live with it.

The Information Ecology group (formerly the Physical Language Workshop) explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources. Through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies, we are creating seamless and pervasive ways to interact with our information—and with each other. We focus on projects that harness the ecology of consumer electronics and sensor devices—present and future—to more smoothly mediate the boundaries between the physical and information worlds we inhabit.

Technology has allowed people to develop larger social networks than previously done. But as a result, we have more relationships than we can manage. Social Gardening explores using plants as metaphor for relationships, hoping to encourage us to tend our social connections like we do our garden. By tracking and analyzing communications through email, instant messaging, social websites, SMS, and phone, Social Gardening proposes to give feedback on how our relationships are flourishing or wilting. It may also provide a practical interface to browse and manage conversations and contacts.

Would you know if a dear, but seldom seen, friend happened to be on the same train as you? The proximeter is both an agent that tracks the past and future proximity of one’s social cloud, and an instrument that charts this in an ambient display. By reading existing calendar and social network feeds of others, and abstracting these into a glanceable pattern of paths, we hope to nuture within users a social proprioception and nudge them toward more face-to-face interactions when opportunities arise.

une règle des bibliographies françaises sur l’écologie : elle ne compte aucun représentant, direct ou indirect, de l’écologie philosophique, de l’éthique environne-mentale, ou de la « deep ecology ». Ni le Norvégien Arne Naess (né en 1912), ni les Américains John Baird Callicott (né en 1941), Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), Edward Abbey (1927-1989), Edward O. Wilson (né en 1929), ni le Britannique James Love-lock (né en 1919) n’y figure. Pourquoi ? Parce qu’ils ne sont pour ainsi dire pas traduits en français. Pourquoi ne sont-ils pas traduits en français ? Parce que l’écologie philosophique a chez nous la réputation d’être une pensée « controversée ».

But with that I wanted to throw a comment on why society is so resistant to change. Instead of embracing change, we are inventing new mechanisms to greenwash our consciences, in a way. I didn’t want to say that carbon offsetting is bad because I believe it plays a role within our strategy to tackle climate change. But not as a starting point. It can come in when we’ve done all we can to reduce carbon emissions, all we can to think about the way we use resources, recycle, we produce waste. Only then we can begin to offset our carbon emissions… but not at the start.