November 2007
39 posts
collaboration vs. cheating →
One Laptop Per Child News: “The problem with treating collaboration as cheating is that collaboration is precisely what children need to learn in order to succeed in business, science, government or anything else when they grow up and leave school. Hear hear.
Googlewatt →
Bloody hell, Google just announced they’re becoming an energy company!
More (but light) info here.
Makes a lot of sense - renewable energy is a primarily a clean technology problem (vs. mucky industrial activity like digging for coal or drilling oil), maybe it makes sense that the emergent renewable energy company for the 21st century is a computing org, experienced in distrbuted...
optimising for the experience of being mobile... →
Last night I posted on Seed, a new forum discussing the business of web apps, set up by my pals at Litmus. I was wondering about apps whose design focus is on the actual experience of being with a mobile, vs. being optmised for mobile devices. I was trying to think of apps that are designed around the experience of mobility, here’s what I initially came up with as best examples:
Google...
An idea for (e)book annotations →
I was thinking about this last night - I don’t know (without doing any research, mind you) of any transferrable way of creating and sharing annotations for books. I’m thinking something along the lines of a ‘mapped’ outline/opml file, where the outline structure maps against chapters and pages of a book, and an ebook reader (device and/or software) could display the...
Thoughts on ebooks →
I’ve been digesting the news this week (and rumoured for the last 12 mths), that Amazon is launching its long awaited ebook reader: I’d written a few emails to a geek mailing list, before the device was officially announced and after the first wave of histrionic blog reviews came out. I thought I’d reuse those emails, edited a little, as they sum up my thoughts around this (to...
Sandy - personal email assistant →
Sandy — your personal email assistant looks really interesting… Basically - forward @whatever tagged based emails with some key verbs (‘remind’ ‘tell’ etc) and this system will parse this into a reminder system, squirting back reminder It’s based, I think on the Stikkit tech (certainly the same team). I really like the personalised faux human copy - bizzarely I...
“satyr means:
map-making
independent
tooth decay
lecher”
– FreeRice. Lovely - a tiny slice of time, educational, simple and for a good cause. It’s ‘lecher’ by the way (I guessed!). Worth clicking on the totals link in the top right to see huge exponential growth.
“It took just one run — no, more like a few hundred yards — of floating at...”
– Chairlifts Are for Sissies - New York Times
I’ve got to improve my skiing and then go and get dropped at the top of a mountain…
OLPC gets SimCity →
Ars Technica:
“Electronic Arts announced yesterday plans to donate the original version of the SimCity computer game to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project so that it can be distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries on OLPC’s XO laptop.”
And this gem from the person pushing this particular approach:
“”The goal is to enable the open-source community...
Norman Mailer 1923-2007 →
Sad news. I’ve not read as much Mailer as one ought, but I remember as clear as day, sitting down and reading ‘The Fight’, a fantastic evocation of the Ali/Forman fight. I was captivated by Mailer’s screen presence in ‘When We Were Kings’ and rushed out to buy The Fight. And I saw a wonderful bit of foootage of Mailer vs. Germaine Greer, taking on a favourite...
Paperless Office... →
43 Folders has got a crazy (in a really good way!) conversation on building a document scanningworkflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap check this automated nerdery out, it’s incredible: “…These resultant pdf’s are then moved by the script to the main ‘files’ folder, where another python script…files them into subdirs based on financial year, or filename keywords for specific...
M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry →
New York Times:
“The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.”
Tidbits:
$15 million in architects fees
$300 million to construct
...
Google mobile platform →
Oh, it’s much more than a phone - it’s Google becoming the Operating System vendor benevolent dictator for the emerging dominant platform of this century - connected, portable devices.
It was clear Google was on the verge of announcing something, framing the conversation - but in retrospect, the framing was all around ‘platform’ of handsets.
A good bet - more handsets...
Joi Ito's: Otetsudai Networks →
Joi Ito has a fascinating writeup onOtetsudai Networks:
“With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash register or help wash dishes, you just send the request to Otetsudai Networks and within minutes, you...
“… peek into the concrete-floor houses and a schoolroom with almost no...”
– Google Goes Globe-Trotting.
Interesting article, and interesting tidbit about the realities of rural India (but we knew India’s saturated with mobile phones, right?)
link by way of Scripting News
Google working the NY Times →
You know Google’s really close to announcing the Google Phone, when they make no official comment, but they run a puff piece on the ‘Head of Mobile Platforms’ talking about how cool he is, but with ‘no comment whatsoever’.
It’s a gigantic framing exercise. Here’s two elements from the technique that are clearly being deployed:
Stories (myths and...
“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to...”
– Can’t believe (geddit?) I didn’t spot this The Believer interview with David Simon about the Wire. Thanks Alex!
Ask the (NYTimes) Editor - spelling and grammar →
I is the world’s worst speller, so The New York Times - Reader Questions and Answers page from the Deputy Editor on correct use of grammar will come in rather useful.
1 tag
SimCity Societies →
The new version of SimCity, ‘Societies’ sounds pretty bloody good. According to Scientific American, a player (architect/urban planner?)’s focus will be:
SimCity Societies encourages its virtual architects to design cities that maximize any one of a number of different values, including authority, creativity, knowledge, productivity, prosperity and spirituality.
Apparently...
making the most of a design engagement →
This just came through from a newsletteradaptive path » making the most of a design engagement
“Here are Adaptive Path’s tips for our clients — or yours.”
Great list…
Future Reading →
Anthony Grafton on “Future Reading” is a really tight (I presume) overview of a long New Yorker piece on the impact of book/text digitization by Google.
I’ve parked the New York article for later reading (I pop these interesting, but timesink articles into folders that pop on weekends :-) - this one is for the end of Nov, but the overview’s a great appetiser.