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Technology has been a part of archaeology from the time it shifted from treasure hunting to academic profession, from using geography to plot a grid on a dig site, mechanics to pump out a flooded tomb, statistics to map demographic changes or now, using personal technology and global positioning software to identify the previously unknown. The latter is what Professor Chris Fisher , associate professor in CSU's Department of Anthropology, and his team from Colorado State University have done. They discovered a large, ancient urban center using rugged handheld computers and GPS. Sponsor This thousand-year-old urban center stands, overgrown with scrub and soil, in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Fisher's team used four Trimble Recon rugged handheld computers in conjunction with GeoXH and GeoXT GPS receivers, to do real-time, on-site mapping of over 1,300 architectural features, including hundreds of "house mounds," in just one acre of the site. They took 25 to 30 data points on each feature but were still able to complete the initial full-coverage mapping in a month. "The technology accelerated our ability to get meaningful data," he said. "We were able to create an architectural typology of the site right away!" The city was part of the Purépecha Empire , also known as the Tarascan Empire. The Purépecha controlled a great chunk of western Mexico with a fortified frontier. On the other side of that frontier? The much better known Aztec Empire. The technology, and the strategy Fisher developed for its use, allowed the near-immediate capture of a frieze-like picture of the urbanization of a Purépecha center that enabled empire. The city, which prior to Fisher's work, was nothing but a couple of ruins and a pin in a map, turned out to be five square kilometers. Without the hand-held, on-site tech, it would have possibly taken seasons of painstaking mapping to develop the picture. "The Lake Pátzcuaro Basin was the geopolitical core of the empire with a dense population, centralized settlement systems, engineered environment and a socially stratified society," said Fisher. Although the city was initially discovered during the 2009 season, Fisher is currently presenting his findings officially at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. His team will continue mapping the city this summer. Fisher specializes in climate change archaeology, plotting changes in climate and the cultural adaptation that went with it, including identifying which strategies worked and which failed. A project studying this, Legacies of Resilience , is partially funded by the National Science Foundation. "One of the great challenges for the 21st century will be creating solutions to link social and environmental change," said Fisher. "Archaeology is uniquely poised to make a significant contribution to this debate by helping to explain trajectories of socio-ecosystem evolution over long time periods." When Fisher heads back the site on April 18, he intends to make greater use of Google SketchUp , a 3D modeling program. He already used it to make in-field sketches but this season he and his team will use it extensively to create a portfolio of walkable sketches and a three-dimensional picture of the urban center and its agriculture. The same technology we use in our daily lives is helping to make that contribution possible. I'm sorry. But exactly how cool is that? Fessin' up time. I hooked Chris up with his computer system during the time I worked for its manufacturer. I did so because the project, climate change archaeology, was so cool I almost fainted when he told me about it. Discuss
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Mobile Tech Helps Uncover Mesoamerican Lost City
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The long-closed nature of Apple's iPhone OS ecosystem is coming to a head with the addition of major new restrictions on developers. If there ever was a time when the Android world had a chance to out-innovate Apple, this could be it. Each day this week, developers have pointed out another indignity Apple's legal framework subjects them to. Could this be the pressure that gets resolved by the rise of a compelling Android offering? It seems like a long shot. Sponsor People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code , 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps , Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple's permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day. At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad. If someone could, a grand battle could emerge. Instead, right now it's looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster . The Anguish Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard : Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple's permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized. I've always worked at the edge; it's where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I've created would have been possible in an ask permission environment.... I won't work in this ask-permission environment any longer. As Google's Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, "It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don't know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind." Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple's Ecosystem Remains the Best Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society , offers another perspective. Android needs a better OS before we'd even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn't fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple's legal terms. It's the platform that I fell in love with. It's the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform. Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave - but probably not enough for consumers to notice. If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple's hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer - then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big "ifs" in play. An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn't it? Discuss
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Apple's Tightening Grip: This Could Be Android's Big Chance
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During today's SXSW keynote , social media research Danah Boyd , who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so. Sponsor Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it - both online and offline - and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken. Google Buzz: Privacy Fail Looking at the example of Google Buzz , which she called a "privacy fail," Boyd argued that Google didn't do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had. Google's mistakes: Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world. Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn't want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz. Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to. To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don't necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups. It's also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there - while you don't expect others to be there - and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends. Facebook's Privacy Fail Users generally don't handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was "everyone." People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn't understand the privacy settings. Public by Default, Private by Effort By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences - something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators. The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn't mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook's news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place. What Can Developers Do? There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users. Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn't mean they want to be seen. Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up. Discuss
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Privacy Is Not Dead: Danah Boyd Talks About Privacy at SXSW
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Our top stories this week were about cutting the strings that tie us to our desks. And also about stalking celebrities at SXSW. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things. Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format. Sponsor Story of the Week: Leaving your desk for the cloud, a bike or someplace you'd rather not say. Put.io Turns Torrents Into Streams [Invites] Bicycling Directions, Trails Come to Google Maps Chatroulette Creator Coming to America? 6 Thoughts About Location Madness SXSW 2010 for Web Celeb Stalkers More coverage and analysis of location-based technology Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com , Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates - only $295. Mobile Web Twitter Location? Thanks, But No Thanks Is the iPhone Still More Personal than Professional? Japan's Largest Telco Goes OpenID More Mobile Web coverage Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey , and yours truly, Richard MacManus , ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief. The moderator will be Orville Schell , the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST (-5 GMT), from the Paley Center for Media, New York City. Internet of Things Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds? More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google Wave Extensions Gallery Launches Chasing Real-Time Raindrops in an Ocean of Content Google's Mobile Product Search Now Shows Real-Time Local Inventory More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. 10 Principles For Not Killing Your Startup All the Small Things: Facebook Demonstrates How to Get Big Results From Little Changes First Look at TechStars Historical Results Data ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. International Blackberry Outage Goes Into Day 2 Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. SXSW 2010 for Cloud Lovers Cloud Religion: Do's, Do Not's, and a Glimpse of Nirvana Cisco in the Core: Preparing for the Next Generation Internet That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss
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Weekly Wrapup: Bike Trails, Location Madness, SXSW, And More...
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For many years, I have been famously (or notoriously) anti-Silicon Valley . There's nothing wrong with the place in iteself; what I detested was the snobbish notion that the Valley is the de facto or "best" place to run a startup or be involved with the tech world. I'm now forced to eat my words as my hetero life mate and I prepare to move into a Burlingame apartment conveniently located a few blocks away from the startup he's now working at; I have to admit, living in the Bay Area has been amazing so far, in professional and personal terms. Still, if I were starting a company, would I move from Omaha or Nashville or Boulder to come to the Valley? Would you? Sponsor Back when I started the Never Mind the Valley series , I was fascinated by communities such as Boulder and Los Angeles. The tech scenes are smaller and more easily navigable, and most people are willing and excited to collaborate. When contrasting these areas with the SF Bay Area, NorCal seemed vast, cold, inflated and self-important by comparison. For months, I railed, "You don't have to be in the Valley to have a successful startup!" Examples of this abound, from Austin's Gowalla to L.A.'s Mahalo to the dozens of incubated and accelerated teams in cities all over the country. However, on moving to San Francisco, I quickly learned a few of the benefits of being a startup in the Valley. Everything loves much faster. You have more access to more capital. The depth, breadth and strength of the developer pool is unparalleled. Everyone has a fairly public track record. Yes, it can be an insular and self-aggrandizing little echo chamber of Mutual Admiration Society nitwits at times, but I'm no longer saying that the benefits don't outweigh the cost. Ah, yes - the cost. Living in the Bay Area is, to employ a common NorCalism, hella expensive. Salaries are higher, real estate is more scarce and more spendy, the overall cost of living borders on obscene unless you're used to, say, Tokyo. But again, perhaps for many startups situated here, the benefits outweigh the financial costs, as well. So, I'm left wondering exactly what alchemy makes the benefits worth all the costs for a startup. I've been asked by a few companies about transitioning from other states and even other countries to the Valley, and my advice has tended to be a mixed bag lately. I'm interested to hear from startups living in and outside of Silicon Valley: When do you think being in SF is worth it, and when is it wiser to stay put? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Discuss
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Open Thread: When Is The Valley Worth Moving To?
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