Tracking Trash from Can to Pile

Trackers are really nothing new.  James Bond was slapping homing devices on evil-doers cars back in the 60’s.

Now, thanks to ever smaller and more powerful devices, these trackers are on to more scientific work.

The team behind the experiment, MIT’s Senseable City lab, led by Carlo Ratti, have made a device that is about the size of a small matchbox and that works like a cell phone – without the phone bit. A SIM card inside the chip blips out its location every 15 minutes, the signal is picked up by local cell phone antennae and the chip’s location is relayed back to MIT.

Ratti’s team and New Scientist have already deployed a test run of 50 tracked items of trash ranging from paper cups to computers in Seattle. Several thousand more will be released in Seattle and New York garbage cans later this summer and we’ll chuck a batch into the London trash for good measure.    LINK

Eventually, the team hopes to track hundreds of types of trash from the moment they are tossed to their eventual final resting place.  Imagine being able to get this data as a Google Maps layer.

I wonder if there would be any positive impact on our own trash habits if we actually saw where every single item we tossed actually ended up?  I think the whole “out of sight, out of mind” mentality makes it incredibly easy to toss without care.

Who is the Most Important Person in the World? You!

Every time you turn around there is another service out there that will let you tell anyone willing to listen what you are thinking, doing, listening to or planning.

Now, with the new iPhone on the horizon, there is growing interest in using personal GPS as a way to let everyone know WHERE you are.

I find myself, a lover of all things tech, siding a bit with Steven over on Mashable:

“Some folks like MG Siegler from ParisLemon might think this is just the coolest idea that gets him all excited. I fail to see how seeing a constant stream of Brightkite announcements flooding social media services like Twitter and FriendFeed is not incredibly irritating. It’s not like knowing where you are every five or ten minutes is earth shattering news that we all need to know. If anything there are times when this kind of pollution makes me want to just close any window I have open to social media providers who support these location based services.”

Modern life is a constant give-and-take between privacy and convenience.  Sure, it would be great to get constant updates regarding the whereabouts of your friends, but do you really want that sort of information floating around for anyone to see?

It is going to be interesting to see if there is a large generational divide that emerges between the youth who see this sort of constant flow of personal data to be perfectly normal, and those a bit older who have always found a certain comfort in knowing their basic whereabouts are a private matter.

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More on Penguin’s Web Publishing Foray

There is a more complete look on CNet about what Penguin has up its sleeve with their online publishing scheme:

“We Tell Stories is actually a seven-part adventure, said Jeremy Ettinghausen, the digital publisher for Penguin. It will begin with six weekly installments, each of which is based on a classic novel–and written by a different Penguin author–and which tasks participants with finding their way through the story using tools developed for the game.

After the six installments, We Tell Stories will continue with a seventh weekly piece that will be a game tying the six stories together.

“There is a seventh story, where the game element exists,” said Etthinghausen, “and it links the other six stories.”

Added Adrian Hon, the chief of creative for Six to Start, “the seventh story is a more traditional ARG, and it sort of feeds into the other six stories and binds them together. The seventh story gives you motivation to read all six stories, and explains why they’re written.”

The fact that this is being done by Penguin is especially interesting since they are one the bigger and more established publishers out there.  Doing projects on this scale require the sort of financing and infrastructure that a company like Penguin has and it might be why we are seeing this from them instead of a smaller house.