November 2008
56 posts
Japan's workers urged to go home early to... →
Japan’s workers are being urged to switch off their laptops, go home early and use what little energy they have left on procreation, in an attempt to avert demographic disaster.
The drive to…
Put change.gov Under Revision Control! →
Last week, the New York Times wrote about Changes at change.gov:
The policy section of the transition site was removed without notice just days after Change.gov went live shortly after the…
This just popped into itunes…
One of the...
Stamps of Approval →
A set of first class stamps are to be issued in January next year commemorating ten icons of British design. The Royal Mail’s new series offers up a discernably nostaligic look at some…
Dumbing Down the Cloud →
Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here’s the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computing: “Cloud Computing is a paradigm…
Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard... →
Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their…
Asynchronous Multiplayer Mobile Gaming →
With all the news on Friday about Apple’s release of iPhone OS 2.2, there was another iPhone news item that got less attention than it deserved. Two young iPhone developers, Danielle Cassley and…
“The monkeys must grab the bags of money and not just shriek and go running all...”
– Shouts & Murmurs: The Plan: Humor: The New Yorker
via Mr Baio
Why bees are the most invaluable species →
Bees were last night declared the most invaluable species on the planet at the annual Earthwatch debate. The audience heard from five eminent scientists who battled it out for fungi, bats,…
Google's new 'SearchWiki' feature →
Just been grokking Google’s launch of their SearchWiki enabled search results, in a collaborative review with Simon Wheatley. This is a big deal, I think; Google acts as the de facto interface…
Golden Notebook project - discussion on structure →
There’s an interesting comment thread (complete with troll!) on ‘The Golden Notebook’, the collaborative reading project I mentioned earlier this week; Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook - Is…
The world as the interface – location data and the... →
Jonathan Follett, president and CEO of Hot Knife Design, Inc., a Boston based UX and web collaborative, shares his thoughts on the hybrid experience of interacting with on-line…
The Commoditization of Massive Data Analysis →
Big Data is a major theme on the O’Reilly Radar, so we’re delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases…
Augmenting reality →
Remember the Playstation EyeToy? Here’s a technology preview using a webcam and printed (no printer, so I figured a scribbled logo would work just as well - it did)… The video on…
The Commoditization of Massive Data Analysis →
Big Data is a major theme on the O’Reilly Radar, so we’re delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases…
SGN iFun iGolf Instructional Video →
Skip the cheesy promo in the first 20s and marvel at this integrated iphone/touch app - like the Wii, but a strapless £300 device is the controller (hold tight!)
Interesting idea, and looks like v. smooth integration. Also interesting to see them leverage Facebook-as-platform for socialising the app.
The Five Dollar Comparison →
Photos above taken from the fivedollarcomparson.org site - they make more sense with the notes posted here You’re on your way to meet up with friends and only realise after 5 minutes that…
Michael Heller and the Gridlock Economy →
Professor Michael Heller of Columbia University got a nice endorsement for his book the other day. Former President Bill Clinton recommended his book, The Gridlock Economy: How Too…
Collaborative reading →
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a rather wonderful experiment in collaborative reading; an elegant pairing of Wordpress and Vanilla, blended with an important literary text and a…
Jonathan Glancey: Frozen skyline as architecture... →
‘I didn’t lose any work in the first recession I experienced,” says Zaha Hadid, “because I didn’t have any work.” This was the early 1970s, the time of the three-day week, when the lights of…
The miraculous power of scale →
In this talk at UC Berkeley, Google’s Sergey Brin confesses (at minute 1:27) that he thought Wikipedia couldn’t work. Most people wouldn’t contribute, he rightly assumed, and it would…
Ed Miliband to exempt Sellafield consortia from... →
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, is to exempt from the Freedom of Information Act the new US-led private consortia taking over the running of Britain’s biggest nuclear…
Q&A: Ian Freed of Amazon Kindle →
A fairly anodyne interview with the guy responsible for Kindle. Didn’t learn anything new, but if completely avoiding answering a question shows a discomfort about a topic, then e-reader apps on…
The paperless President →
NYTimes.com: “Mr. Obama’s memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review. If…
Burkhard Bilger: The rise of extreme beer. →
Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their…
James Surowiecki: On how we created the food... →
This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a hundred and fifty per cent in a few months) and maize provoked food…
The miraculous power of scale →
In this talk at UC Berkeley, Google’s Sergey Brin confesses (at minute 1:27) that he thought Wikipedia couldn’t work. Most people wouldn’t contribute, he rightly assumed, and it would…
Alan Rusbridger reflects on the legacies of Hugo... →
On July 21 1997, Tony Blair, Hugo Young and I met for tea in the garden of Number 10. The prime minister was reasonably assiduous in talking things over with columnists and editors and on this…
Capitalism and Credit →
There was a time, a few weeks ago, when I thought Hank Paulson was the right man for the job of rescuing the economy. Now I don’t think so. Which leads me to worry about who Obama will put…
Five scientists argue the case for the world's... →
Fungi ‘It keeps the trees alive, recycles waste and helps us’ Professor Lynne Boddy of the Cardiff School of Biosciences
Fungi have a bad reputation, usually being thought of as poisoners,…
OCLC and the Great Library Scandal →
A couple of months ago I was doing some research into various sources of book data, and one of the things I was interested in was seeing if it was possible to hook into local library data….
What This Country Needs is a Chief Technology... →
I’ve read in a few places recently that president-elect Obama plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer for America, perhaps as a cabinet-level position. This is one of those brilliant…
Sniffing out the future in Morogoro, Tanzania →
If you’re looking for evidence of human shortsightedness, you might start with landmines. Popular as an inexpensive tool of warfare, landmines now render land uninhabitable and unusable in 45…
3 launches 'Facebook phone' →
Hmmm. let me just say I like 3; they’re a truly innovative telco, abel to take the pricing and application openness risks the larger incumbents are unwilling (such as pay-to-receive offnet…
Simon Jenkins: Officialdom cannot hammer straight... →
Surprise, surprise. How we all hate the nanny state - until nanny takes a day off. Then we want nannies galore. We want nannies with whips, nannies with locks, keys and public inquiries….
Nick Davies: The modern media never lets fact get... →
When the Jersey police this week confessed that - contrary to so many ghoulish news stories - they have, in truth, no evidence of children being murdered and buried in an old children’s home…
Apps for Democracy →
Vivek Kundra, the District of Columbia’s CTO, isn’t just talking about transparent government and participative democracy, he’s working hard to make DC’s massive data stores transparent…
Forget the bailout, start over: the New American... →
The bailout of the US financial system isn’t working. The government’s rescue plan has fundamental flaws, including incentives that favor the failed firms, not the country as a whole. New ideas are…
Google flu tracking →
Google.org’s Flu Trends is a fascinating attempt to map emergent trends based on their insight into geo-based search terms (tickly coughs, “wher can I get headache medicine”). Larry…
Gary Younge: Obama's army of supporters must... →
Steve Thompson is heading home. Over the last year he has travelled the country volunteering for President-elect Barack Obama. Thompson, 68, volunteered for Obama in Maryland, Texas,…
NYTImes - How Obama Tapped Into Social... →
A nice piece, The Media Equation in the NYTimes, examines the Obama campaign’s highly effective use of social networking to power their campaign. Its a lot more optimistic than the …
Obama's facebooking of political campaigning →
I’ve spent spare moments over the last few days ploughing through Newsweek’s excellent ‘insider’ coverage of the presidential campaigns. Consisting of a bunch of breezy essays, it’s methadone for…
Wi-fi structures and people shapes →
Following on from my recent ‘post-occupancy evaulation’ of the State Library of Queensland’s wi-fi (see previous post), I thought I’d share a couple of outputs. (Thanks to Tory Jones of…