good java

the rise of Urban Nomadism

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Christopher Waters, the owner, opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as Wi-Fi “hotspots” were mushrooming all around town. His idea was to provide a watering-hole for “techno-Bedouins” such as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, whether in Arabian deserts or American suburbs, are inherently tribal and social creatures, he understood from the outset that a good oasis has to do more than provide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new—or very old—kind of gathering place. He thought of calling his café the “Gypsy Spirit Mission”, which also captures the theme of mobility, but settled for the simpler Nomad.

As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.

But all of those early depictions and predictions of nomadism arguably missed the point. The mobile lifestyles currently taking shape around the world are nothing like those described in the old books. For this the authors cannot be blamed, since the underlying technologies of genuine and everyday nomadism did not exist even as recently as a decade ago. Mobile phones were already widespread, but they were used almost exclusively for voice calls and were fiendishly hard to connect to the internet and even to computers. Laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) needed fiddly cables to get online, and even then did so at a snail's pace. Reading and sending e-mail on a mobile phone—not to mention synchronising it across several gadgets and computers to create one “virtual” in-box—was unheard of. People took photos using film. There was no Wi-Fi. In short, there were gadgets, but precious little “connectivity”.

Astronauts and hermit crabs Without that missing piece, several misunderstandings took hold that now require correcting. One had to do with all those gadgets. The old mental picture of a nomad invariably had him—mostly him, at that time—lugging lots of them. Since these machines, large and small, were portable, people assumed that they also made their owners mobile. Not so. The proper metaphor for somebody who carries portable but unwieldy and cumbersome infrastructure is that of an astronaut rather than a nomad, says Paul Saffo, a trend-watcher in Silicon Valley. Astronauts must bring what they need, including oxygen, because they cannot rely on their environment to provide it. They are both defined and limited by their gear and supplies.



Around the turn of the century, as some astronauts, typically executive road warriors, got smarter about packing light, says Mr Saffo, they graduated to an intermediate stage, becoming hermit crabs. These are crustaceans that survive by dragging around a cast-off mollusc shell for protection and shelter. In the metaphorical sense, the shell might be a “carry-on” bag on wheels, stuffed full of cables, discs, dongles, batteries, plugs and paper documents (just in case of disc failure). These hermit crabs strike fear into the hearts of seated airline passengers whenever they board, because their shells invariably bang into innocent shins all the way to their seat. They carry less than astronauts—and are thus more mobile—but are still quite heavily laden with gear, mostly as a safeguard against disasters.

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don't even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel. As the costs of (stationary) telecommunications plummeted, it became fascinating to contemplate “the death of distance” (the title of a book written by Frances Cairncross, then on the staff of The Economist). And since the early mobile phones were aimed largely at business executives, it was assumed that nomadism was about corporate travel in particular. And indeed many nomads are frequent flyers, for example, which is why airlines such as JetBlue, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are now introducing in-flight Wi-Fi. But although nomadism and travel can coincide, they need not.

Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This is why a new breed of observers is now joining the ever-present futurists and gadget geeks in studying the consequences of this technology. Sociologists in particular are trying to figure out how mobile communications are changing interactions between people. Nomadism, most believe, tends to bring people who are already close, such as family members, even closer. But it may do so at the expense of their attentiveness towards strangers encountered physically (rather than virtually) in daily life. That has implications for society at large.

Anthropologists and psychologists are investigating how mobile and virtual interaction spices up or challenges physical and offline chemistry, and whether it makes young people in particular more autonomous or more dependent. Architects, property developers and urban planners are changing their thinking about buildings and cities to accommodate the new habits of the nomads that dwell in them. Activists are trying to piggyback on the ubiquity of nomadic tools to improve the world, even as they worry about the same tools in the hands of the malicious. Linguists are chronicling how nomadic communication changes language itself, and thus thought.

Beyond technology This special report, in presupposing that a wireless world will soon be upon us, will explore these ramifications of mobile technology, rather than the technologies themselves or their business models. But it is worth making clear that technology underlies all of the changes in today's nomadic societies, so that its march will accelerate them. Wireless data connections, in particular, seem to be getting better all the time. Cellular networks will become faster and more reliable. Short-range Wi-Fi hotspots are popping up in ever more places. And a new generation of wireless technologies is already poised to take over. Regulators have grasped that the airwaves are now among society's most important assets. America, for instance, has just auctioned off a chunk of spectrum with new rules that require the owner to allow any kind of device and software to run on the resulting network.

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony's Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple's commercialisation of the “graphical user interface”, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.

Cumulatively, all of these changes amount to a historic merger, at long last, of two technologies that have already proved revolutionary in their own right. The mobile phone has changed the world by becoming ubiquitous in rich and poor countries alike. The internet has mostly touched rich countries, and rich people in poor countries, but has already changed the way people shop, bank, listen to music, read news and socialise. Now the mobile phone is on course to replace the PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 3.3 billion people, more than half the world's population, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service (see chart 1), so the internet at last looks set to change the whole world.

To people in early-adopter countries such as South Korea and Japan this will come as no surprise. (Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.) Nor will it come as a shock to people in their teens and twenties elsewhere who have never known life without text messages; or to itinerant salesmen and executives who have for years been glued to their BlackBerries day and night. By contrast, many older people will strain to recognise themselves in the behaviour patterns described in this report, and indeed may never adopt them. But the lesson of history is that what the geeks and early adopters do today, the rest of us will probably end up doing tomorrow or the day after. It is the pioneers that set the direction; the mainstream will follow in time.

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it. As Ms Canlas sips her Americano and dives into her e-mail in-box at the Nomad Café, she gives no thought to the specifications and standards that make her connection possible. It is the human connections that now take over. Since humans, as Sigmund Freud put it, must arbeiten und lieben, work and love, in order to find fulfilment, this report will start off by examining how they will work.

from the Economist

aah Delicious, life-affirming coffee

Now that I have a coffee plunger, I can indulge in such delights as the above, purchased from my local Coffee Bean
(just outside Low Yat)

The $50 a cup of Coffee ~ Kopi Luwak

COFFEE has always had its connoisseurs, people willing to pay over the odds for a cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain or a splash of Green Tipped Bourbon beans from St Helena, a reputed favourite of Napoleon's during his exile on the island.

But rarely has there been a boutique brew like kopi luwak, whose price tag of $1500 a kilogram, or about $50 a cup, makes it the most expensive coffee in the world.

"It's really the Grange Hermitage of coffees," Rob Forsyth, of Forsyth Coffee, says. "It's got a nice sweet, rosy, floral kind of flavour, very delicate and smooth."

Forsyth, who sells 300 grams of kopi luwak a year, says its price is a reflection less of its quality than its scarcity. It's thought that just 500 kilograms of the stuff make it to market every year and only then after a highly unorthodox journey to the cup.

Kopi luwak is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted by the Asian palm civet, or luwak, a mongoose-like mammal native to the jungles of South-East Asia. The flesh of the coffee cherry is digested, but the bean passes through intact and is deposited in piles of scat that are collected by hand from the jungle floor.

Fans of kopi luwak claim that enzymes in the stomach of the civet (whose diet also includes other fruit, insects, small mammals and reptiles) enhance the bean's flavour by breaking down the proteins that give coffee its bitter taste. "It's incredibly smooth and chocolatey," says Albert Taylor, whose Mandailing Kopi Luwak has just been launched in Australia. "When I give people a cup they sit there for about half an hour afterward running their tongue around their mouths savouring the sensation."

An Australian living in Indonesia, Taylor owns and operates a 200-hectare plantation in the Mandailing Highlands in north-western Sumatra. He bought the land in 1998 and began growing the original arabica coffee strain introduced by the Dutch in the early 18th century, as well as another relatively new arabica variety.

Taylor began collecting kopi luwak in 2002, following a chance conversation with a friend in Bali. "He told me about this civet cat coffee that was selling for $US600 a kilo. I thought he was pulling my leg. And then I clicked, thinking, 'So that's what all that cat poo around my plantation is."'

Taylor says there are problems in the industry as people have put civets in cages and force-fed them any old variety of coffee beans.

Jennifer Murray, a specialty roaster in Western Australia and member of the Australasian Specialty Coffee Association, recently visited a plantation in Bali where caged civets were being fed robusta beans.

"The whole operation looked a bit dodgy, to be quite frank," she says. "And when we tasted the coffee we were disappointed. It was nothing special but that might have had something to do with the beans the animals were eating."

Taylor says the civets on his plantation enjoy a veritable smorgasbord of excellent beans, "which makes all the difference".

Then there is the issue of authentication. At present there is no internationally accepted method of verifying whether a bean is kopi luwak. "People come up with these Indonesian authentication certificates," Taylor says. "But they are worthless and that's ruining the industry, too. We are looking at verification through a lab in Switzerland that we've sent samples to, to try to identify a print for the bean that will work as an industry benchmark. At the moment, people really don't know. The aroma is distinctive, amazingly sweet, but to an untrained nose it's harder to tell."

Questions of quality aside, kopi luwak has been good news for coffee lovers and the industry, Forsyth says. "It's made a major contribution in making coffee drinkers aware that different coffee beans are not simply region specific - there are a variety of bean types and processing methods that really do affect the final result brewing in your cup. It's also whetting consumers' appetites for exploring the different qualities that come from each bean."


For Mandailing Kopi Luwak stockists, see www.mandailingestate.com.au

Last weekend I finally finished reading Charles Stross excellent 'accelerando', a brilliant, complicated & funny story of the impending technological singularity and the repercussions for the future of humanity.

It begins a few years or so in the future, and ends three generations later in a floating city high in the atmosphere above Saturn. One of the key characters is a robot cat. There are digital lobsters, albino orangutans and a flock of pidgeons that work as one group mind.

If this sounds like your cup-o-tea, then you're in luck, because the entire novel is available free, online here.

If you'd like a different file-type than the above html, then you're also in luck, because on www.accelerando.org there are links to text file version, ebooks version, pdf's.. you name it.
There is also a technical companion for the novel... it can be a pretty full-on read.

~

In other news, I gots me a shiny new phone. It's a htc touch cruise [see below] and it's a load of nerdy fun.


.. Sure, I haven't entirely figured out how to use it, but I will, and it shall be grande.
Update: I've actually just signed up for an unlimited mobile data plan, I figure that that's the way everything is probably going to be in a few years time anyway, so why not jump on it now and see what it's like.

I specifically wanted unlimited data because I wanted a situation where I didn't have to worry about the costs.
Kinda like with the invent of digital cameras. I don't know about you, but when I was using a film camera, I was a lot more selective about what shots I took because every shutter close cost me about 80 cents to develop the film.

Sure, it could be argued that this could be creatively inspiring, I admit that limitation is quite useful when inspiring creativity. But I also bet that I missed out on a lot of good shots.

The thing is that I'm not necessarily trying to be creative here, at least not as a major motivation. I want to feel what it's like to be able to take photos on my phonecam and upload it to flicker and create blog posts directly from the device and do things like IM and streaming audio without worrying about my bill.

I want to explore my options :)

.. check out the tech specs of the htc touch cruise here.

~

Last Saturday I also spend about 2hrs sitting in the coffee bean at Low Yat, drinking the largest no-fuss, sumartran dark coffee I could buy and reading.
It was so relaxing, why don't I do this more often?

I don't have the answer. I haven't been a coffeeshop sitter since at university, and honestly, it's a bad thing.

Sitting in coffee shops for hours is clearly the pinnacle of our society, and, if we're going to progress as a species it should be encouraged at all costs.




and yes, the accelerando book cover has been oh-so-realistically placed in the lower corner by yours truly.

~

Hmmm.. what else did I do last weekend? Oh yes, we went to see 'John Rambo', which was actually my girlfriend's idea *shock*, and quite a good idea at that.

I'll cover my thoughts on the movie in another post.
Till then, tata.

- Liquid Kiss -

The pottery, named Yuanyang II, is one of the collections of Hong Kong Museum of Art now displaying at the Central Concourse of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). It is produced by Tsang Cheung-shing, a ceramic art tutor and product designer.

Yuanyang II is modeled in a distinctive form with two figures indulged in kissing each other. Their heads support two elegant cups for drinking tea and coffee. The form and concept design fully complement the theme “Yuanyang” (a typical Hong Kong beverage of mixing tea and coffee), a symbol of marriage and love, with a touch of humour for artistic creation.