Daily Archives: April 28, 2017

Utopia Theatre Project breathes life into The Seagull, Chekhov's play about life, love, and art.

Join some of the Bay Area's finest actors in surprising roles, as this gender and ethnically diverse cast reveals all the longing, passion, and humor of Chekhov's original intent. Omni Commons, a gorgeous old Italian ballroom and event venue in Oakland, hosts this production. The unconventional theatre space allows for an intimate, immersive experience. Enter into the world of Chekhov's most beloved characters - a world of art, ideas, and love - in this intimately staged production.

Directed by Maryssa Wanlass. Adapted by Anne Yumi Kobori.

CAST:

TRIGORIN: Elizabeth Carter* ARKADINA: Christian Haines* SORIN: Mary Baird* CONSTANTINE: Mark Vashro NINA: Anne Yumi Kobori MASHA: Melissa Ortiz* PAULINA: J Jha ILYA: Anne Hallinan DORN: Dameion Brown MEDVEDENKO: Sean Garahan YAKOV: Lovell Bullock

*Member, Actors' Equity Association. An Equity-approved project.

Performances 8 p.m. May 6, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19 at Omni Commons Ballroom, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. Tickets $10 - $45. Visit http://www.utopiatheatreproject.com, http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2911724, or email utopiatheatreproject@gmail.com for tickets and more information.

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Utopia Theatre Project Breathes New Life Into THE SEAGULL - Broadway World

Commentary: The CEO of Global Wireless Solutions warns that as smart city growth booms in the U.S., failure to manage complex systems carefully could undermine why they were launched in the first place.

While there has been a bright spotlight on thedeployment of smart city technologies in major urban centersaround the world such as London, New York and Singapore there is also an increasing pushamongstate governments in the U.S. to assist or encourage their metropolises to build similar infrastructure.

As populations age and urbanization continues, cities across the U.S. are seeing a growing strain on infrastructure and resources. However, by applying innovative technologies, these cities can improve the quality of life in their communities, provide improved and sustainable services, and safeguard their infrastructure for generations to come.But while much attention is focused on the end vision, an often-overlooked detail involves how all these new smart infrastructure projects and systems will be managed and held together.

These new networks will be made up of a myriad of devices, sensors, connectivity paths, network nodes and gateways. They involve the Internet of Things (IoT), which means the deployment of new and evolving technologies and applications.

Andbecause states and local governments will rely upon these technologies to deliver both non-critical and critical services to their communities, these new networks must be maintained at a level of robustnessthat ensures reliable and consistent communication.To guarantee network reliability and resilience, aspiring smart cities will need to invest in rigorous network benchmarking programs to monitor status, measure the impact of upgrades over time and ensure network performance and stability.

Routine network testing and monitoring should be a cornerstone of any smart citys master plan. These key activities enable the managing authority to catch faults before they impact critical city servicesand determine if those new network additions and enhancements are achieving their expected impact.

With awell-thought-out network benchmarking, measurement and monitoring strategy, cities can better understand the true value of how the smart city technology is impacting their critical areas of service, such as transit, energy, and environmental services. And this needs to be considered now as smart city projects are occurring at a rapid pace throughout the U.S.

In fact, AT&Ts Smart Cities business unit projects that the adoption of smart city technologies in theU.S. is going to hit a huge upswing this year, with cities and states across the country projected to move from the project planning phase to building out frameworks for technology implementation, with 2018 as a target year for project deployments. AT&T themselves are actively engaged with local authorities in the deployment of smart city technologies take for example their recent involvement withGwinnett County,Georgia,where they are helping to deploy a wireless network to better monitor and reduce the amount of drinking water lost when in route to customers.

Meanwhile, the population of smart cities is becoming mobile-first. As smartphone use continues to expand from basic communication needs to entertainment to management of private and homeIoT networks, the dependence on robust and reliable wireless connectivity will become a critical consideration in every walk of life.

The networks in a smart city are integrated and always communicating, underscoring the importance of reliable device connectivity. What good is deploying wireless sensors across a citys trains and buses if they fail to communicate delays or schedule changes because of network performance issues? Similarly, what good is an investment in measuring a citys traffic problems, if because of poor network performance it cannot report the traffic problem to authorities and citizens before thousands more get caught up in the congestion?

States, municipalities and local city governments are investing heavily in equipment and infrastructure by 2026, smart city investment is expected to reach $750 billion in North America. In fact,Cisco estimates thatwithin three years, a smart city of one million people will generate 200 million gigabytes of data each day. The ability to capitalize on these investments to manage complex, integrated smart city systems, and to deliver services to local communities will depend heavily on network reliability. Networks will needto connect and communicate on demand,move and deliver data at the speeds required.

For those planning and building smart cities, its important to factor how well the technology, the service, and the network should perform. Leaders mustensurethat a sound, rigorous monitoring process is in place to enable measurement, evaluation and therefore intelligent investment decisions in smart city technology deployments.

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Smart cities are walking a tightrope between utopia and chaos - StateScoop (registration)

Here's the thing I love about Cory Doctorow: No one is weirder than he is.

And I don't mean run-of-the-mill weird. I don't mean personally weird (though he might be, I don't know him), but as a writer? Super-weird in the best possible way. And he's deep-weird, not gimmicky-weird. Weird in the sense that he has done the math, calculated the forking paths, and is presenting to you a world which isn't just amusing and borderline plausible, but a dispatch from next Tuesday.

His novels read less like speculation than prediction a hardcore nerd's careful read on technology and biology and entropy, impeccably sourced and, in their own way, as real and present and hopeful as the augury of a Bizarro World Cassandra with carpal tunnel and grease under her nails.

Walkaway is his newest, and it is remarkable. It's one of those books that I don't want to describe at all, because doing so would ruin the new car smell of stepping into a fresh-off-the-lot universe. It would sour the joy of getting face-punched over and over again by the utopian/dystopian ideas, theories, arguments and philosophies that Doctorow lays down. It would, in short, wreck the fun.

But let's do this, okay? I'm going to tell you the basics. Because going in, there are some things you should know. Walkaway is, as the title suggests, a story of abandonment. Of giving up an old thing for something new, risky and beautiful. In the near future, the world (more specifically, Canada) is a mess. Global ecological catastrophes, refugee crises, out of control wealth disparity it's all come true. Basically take the front page of any newspaper today, fast forward by a decade or so, and you're at home in Walkaway.

Enter Hubert, Etc. (so-called because of his 19 middle names) and his buddy Seth. They're both poor, slightly over-the-hill scenesters refusing to give up on the tatters of their fading youth. Borderline survivors of a post-scarcity world and a gig economy gone full-tilt dysto, they show up at a "Communist Party" being thrown by Natalie, renegade daughter of a super-rich family (zottarich in Doctorow-ese) who is an expert at taking over old industrial spaces, sweet-talking the mothballed machinery into operation, adding a DJ and some 3D printers and making a free-for-all rave of it.

The cops come. Drones descend. Bad things happen. Natalie, Etcetera and Seth flee and, in short order, decide that they're sick of The Man and The Man's rules and they're just gonna, you know, walk away.

They're not the first. Doctorow's world is one where most people live in "Default" as in the default reality of cities, bills, jobs, whatever. But in between these spirit-crushing bastions of old thought and old rules are a million miles of everything else. Fields. Wildflowers. Entire abandoned cities left to rot. And in Doctorow's fantasy, it is into these spaces that all the world's smart people and capable people and pissed-off people have gone.

"The point of Walkaway is the first days of a better nation," says one of Doctorow's characters. Says many of them, actually. That's the recurring belief-system on which the book runs. It is the story of precisely this what comes after the slow-burn apocalypse we all secretly fear is coming, how it will work, how it will all go wrong and how it will get made right again with drones, wet printers and elbow grease. It's like the Genesis story of a world not yet here, but maybe dangerously close. After the flood, this is how we rebuilt ...

And yes, it sometimes reads like a series of philosophical set-pieces stitched together with drone fights and lots of sex. Like a Michael Bay movie if all the explosions were emotional. But the philosophy is fascinating and, somehow, rarely dull because it, like Walkaway culture, revolves around sharing, fierce debate and open-sourced best practices. It is world-as-lesson-as-world. An anti-Atlas Shrugged. An origami argument that unfolds into a novel.

By my own (admittedly poor) math, it presents roughly ten thousand new, mind-bending and ground-breaking ideas per page. There are words in here that only otherwise exist in insular pockets of the maker/hacker/open source/thingiverse sub-sub-culture. In terms of its geek heroism, epic, generational scope and high stakes (only the survival of the human race, after all, and possibly the cure for death), the only literary comparison I can make is to Neal Stephenson's hard science disaster masterpiece, Seveneves, but Walkaway is more human. More squishy and close to home.

It's the story of a utopia in progress, as messy as every new thing ever is, told in the form of people talking to each other, arguing with each other and working together to solve problems. It's all about the deep, disturbing, recognizable weirdness of the future that must come from the present we have already made for ourselves, trying to figure out what went wrong and what comes next.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, videogames, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

Originally posted here:

In 'Walkaway,' a blueprint for a new, weird (but better) world - Minnesota Public Radio News