feathering life

i have migrated servers and domain because soon i won’t have MIT webspace, so from now on, all blog posts will be going down at

http://blog.welcometothewilderness.org

thanks for visiting the site while it was here, and hopefully see you over at the other site!

brad

sometimes when i have free time and am under the influence of something (substances, love, confusion) i get really hellbent on mashing up images together from the internet and creating new ones, preferably psychadelic ones. i just posted the previous ones ive done to flickr, you can get there by clicking here or the picture above to see what im doing at 4 in the morning instead of sleeping sometimes.

ChopWatch is an aggregated database of upcoming timber cuts on public land which are proposed by various government departments and agencies. Users can see and connect with areas for the first and possibly last time before they are deforested. ChopWatch seeks to aggregate public timbering information which is hidden or tucked away by government agencies, placed in obscure formats and locations, and generally unintelligible for human consumption, parse the information, and return intelligible and complete information about nation-wide timber practices. Users can input their address and visually see on a map the outline of the closest forests that are planned to be cut down within the next year. Additional information including acreage, GPS coordinates, cutting method (clearcut, partial, etc), etc are also available. ChopWatch is primarily a geo-spatial database enabling users to easily visualize proximity, scale, and frequency of timber management practices in areas of interest.

Additionally, the aggregated timber data will be accessible via an API so developers can use the data for their own application-specific purpose. Whether it be a concerned citizens group automatically finding the nearest forest and the corresponding district representative or a radical environmental group generating a map of large forests near city centers where support can be mobilized from, ChopWatch provides the information and basic visualization while allowing users to creatively use the data for their own application. Eventually, increased transparency of public land use and timber management policy could lead to public pressure for improved timber policy and more democratic decisions of public land use.

I recently demo’d this at the Knight Future of News and Civic Media Conference and received a lot of good feedback and support. I’ve been working on this project for about 3 months now, and am about to go live with it so stay tuned for more details and the website once it gets up and running! Any comments or suggestions are obviously appreciated.

here are some pictures from my spur of the moment europe trip. kaia emailed me about a $30 ticket, bought the last available ticket 2 hours after i found out, left 5 days later. 3 countries, 9 days. landed in london, stayed w/ my friend brooke for the night, took a bus to amsterdam to hang with holly and her brother tom and camped on a little island and biked around canals and ate great food and played frisbee and enjoyed amazing weather. went to the golden temple via recommendation from jay and got lost in all the allyes. was going to bus back to london 5 days later to meet up w/ brooke and jacque and shannon, all good high school friends, but shannon’s passport got denied so i bussed out to paris to meet up with shannon, crashed at my friend emmas, and got to hang out w/ my friend gina from MIT who was also living in paris. great food, great wine, great roofs, awesome fun. bussed back to london overnight, slept in a couple bus stations, slept at the airport, checked in baggage in order to get my speculoos spread overseas! success! thanks everyone!

dinner with kids & chris from our call 4 action class at media lab was amazing. so many acronyms discussed its hard to imagine this place is real, so wonderful. dva, nvda, fsf, p2p, ict4d, sms, udds, orms, pgp, sts, gps, gsm, apis, nsms, you name it, we talked about it over wine and good food. hell yes mit, hell yes. now, time to cap it off with a good book and some sleep.