Amazing. Diary of an Underground Expedition with Andrew Wonder: The Wilderness Below Your Feet

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From the NY Times:

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"URBAN FRONTIER Erling Kagge led an expedition that revealed an entirely new way of understanding the city. It included a hike in Tibbetts Brook, which runs through a Bronx sewer.

By ALAN FEUER

Published: December 31, 2010

IT must have been the third or fourth day — time, by that point, had started to dissolve — when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers — an ostensibly perceptive lot — sometimes see only what’s directly in front of their eyes...."

This is Amazing! Andrew Wonder's Underground NY Expeditions: UNDERCITY on Vimeo

Andrew Wonder:

"This is a film I made after some adventures underground with Steve Duncan (undercity.org) last summer. We also have a teaser video which you can watch on my vimeo page (vimeo.com/​5752275).

For more information about the video and our other adventures please contact Andrew Wonder (Director/Cinematographer) at andrewwonder@mac.com.

Steve and I just completed another underground expedition with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge (en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Erling_Kagge). It was featured in a three page article on the front page of the NY Times metro section and was written by Alan Feuer (nytimes.com/​2011/​01/​02/​nyregion/​02underground.html).

We were also covered by NPR's Jacki Lyden whose report will be aired on 1/2/11 and posted on NPR's site (npr.org/​2011/​01/​02/​132482428/​into-the-tunnels-exploring-the-underside-of-nyc)."

Really Cool: Interactive Art Lets You See How Suns Are Made [Video] | Co.Design

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Excerpt:

"Created by Berlin-based interactive agency The Product, SOL makes learning about solar fusion into a playful, touchable experience.
If you want to get a close-up look at a miniature sun on earth, the only place to go is the experimental ITER fusion reactor site in France. But if you're an ordinary civilian who's willing to settle for immersive interactive art instead of the real thing, the SOL installation by Berlin-based agency The Product might be a better bet. Visitors can enter a reactor-core-like structure and fuse solar protons using their bare hands -- no security clearance or radiation suit required..."

Cities of the Future: Building a Smarter Favela: IBM Signs Up Rio | Fast Company

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Excerpt:

BY GREG LINDSAY Mon Dec 27, 2010

"IBM is announcing this morning an agreement with the city of Rio de Janeiro to build a “Single City Operations Center,” or what amounts to a control room for the sprawling megalopolis. The center will draw upon data from dozens of municipal departments and public agencies.
While the system will initially focus on predicting the kinds of mudslides and floods that killed hundreds last April and left 15,000 homeless, it’s designed, ultimately, to monitor and respond to any type of emergency--just in time for the city to host both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games.
The deal is IBM’s most ambitious smarter city project to date; previous efforts have tended to be single-purpose programs in developed cities, such as a congestion pricing scheme for London or water management in Dubuque. But Rio is a different situation--a bona fide megacity in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, in the midst of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrade ahead of the World Cup. Although financial terms were not disclosed, the deal illuminates just how indispensable IBM hopes to become to the daily operations of Rio--and how it plans to do the same for cities everywhere...."

read the full post:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1712443/building-a-smarter-favela-ibm-signs-up-rio