February 2009
75 posts
The One Universal GoogleBook →
This week I received two “author” notices from the Google Book Settlement office. One in the mailbox and one by email. The alerts were sent to book authors as a result of a dispute between Google…
why is text on screens so ugly? →
There have been a raft of reviews of the new Kindle and the various iPhone reading applications lately. In general, reviewers are more positive about the experience of reading from a screen than…
5 minutes on the the future of reading... →
Last month I gave a 5 minute micropresentation as part of O’Reilly’s Ignite session in Leeds, on some research I’ve been doing into the future of reading (follow that link for a…
Endless Notebooks →
“I’d describe myself as an inventive, but bad, prototyping engineer; I’ve got a shallow knowledge of most fabrication processes”
One of the things Jack has a shallow knowledge of is bookbinding….
A Library Full Of Dead Trees →
Reading material in Crawley’s brand new library building is not restricted to the pages of the books on its shelves, thanks to a series of typographic tree sculptures created by artist …
unnotebook →
As I mentioned before, I’ve been messing about with an ‘un’ version of a notebook. I’ve always wanted a notebook that did two things:
1. Helped you take notes in the most efficient…
Open source and mobile banking →
After coming home from the Mobile World Congress, Mark Pickens, a microfinance analyst with CGAP’s Technology Program, asks why, when he can load any software he want onto…
Open source and mobile banking →
After coming home from the Mobile World Congress, Mark Pickens, a microfinance analyst with CGAP’s Technology Program, asks why, when he can load any software he want onto…
Paolo Pellegrin's Great Performers →
Please click here to install Flash. © Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos On assignment for the New York Times Magazine, Paolo Pellegrin photographed eight of the contenders for Academy…
Slumdog’s Meaning →
I teach a graduate seminar called The Global Entertainment Marketplace and many of my students come from outside the U.S. and have been acquainted with the notions of “cultural imperialism”….
fair play →
We bought this at the weekend. Dramatically on sale as the high street panics. I have to say, it’s enormous fun, multiple generations had a laugh chucking a ball about, the prospect…
The Solemn Whimsies of Larry Morris →
I haven’t done a blog post about art since I wrote about Amy Lin’s “Dot Art.” I stumbled upon Larry Morris’ metal sculptures at the same place, the Torpedo Factory in Old Town, Alexandria. Here…
Secret agent moth →
Elsewhere on the robotics front, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is making good progress towards its goal of turning insects into remote-controlled surveillance and…
The artificial morality of the robot warrior →
Great strides have been made in recent years in the development of combat robots. The US military has deployed ground robots, aerial robots, marine robots, stationary robots, and (reportedly) space…
Interregnum Lecture →
After many requests from short attention span viewers (even though almost 2000 people have watched the whole 50 minutes), USC has put up the America 3.0 lecture in three epidodes. Here is episode…
In Amsterdam, The Bicycle Still Rules →
The Netherlands has been regarded as the cycling nation since before World War II. In a 1938 newspaper article, the bicycle was dubbed “the most Dutch of all vehicles.” Decades since,…
Free Genetic Testing →
The cheapest commercial genome testing right now is from 23andMe for $400. Prices in this area will continue to drop, while the number of genes sequenced rise. However nothing beats…
Can TWITTER Move Stocks? →
The short answer - I hope so!
All day I get the same question from OLD MEDIA…
What about abuse, pump and dump etc…
No offense old media, but that is what you have been doing in a really bad way…
(The Social Dynamics of) TED Standing Ovations →
The TED conference can be pretty daunting. And I’m not talking about the view from on stage, but seated down there in the auditorium. At the end of every talk each member of the…
The Unabomber Was Right →
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people…
The Training of the Organization Man →
Table of contents for The Organization Man
The Organization Man by William Whyte: Introduction
The Ideology of the Organization Man
The Training of the Organization Man
Recap: In the…
Many Species, One Mind →
As George Dyson demonstrates in his wonderful history of the network mind, “Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence”, the idea of a global brain hatched at the very…
The Training of the Organization Man →
Table of contents for The Organization Man
The Organization Man by William Whyte: Introduction
The Ideology of the Organization Man
The Training of the Organization Man
Recap: In the…
Whitepaper: Public Media 2.0 →
The Center for Social Media of the American University in Washington has published a new whitepaper entitled: “Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics“.
This white paper…
LEED Platinum Prefab Home Now Available →
Yet another large step in the quest to make green building efficient and more affordable: Green building leader Bensonwood Homes has constructed a prototype net zero-energy home that was…
Yochai Benkler on ’social production’ →
Yochai Benkler, who is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was…
Monday morning musing about social networks →
When I look at the digital implementations of social networks of today, they appear to have a core made up of five things:
a directory or address book
the ability to group people in the directory…
Four short links: 17 Feb 2009 →
Four Tuesday quickies:
The Technology Behind Coraline — 3D stop-motion movie used a 3D printer to make the dolls and things like drops of water.
Some OSCON Proposal Tips (Alex Russell) —…
State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: ... →
As described in Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market’s…
ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos →
If you’ve gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it’s time to try your hand with DNA. That’s what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT….
D&AD Student Awards identity →
Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa has unveiled a new identity and promotional material for D&AD’s 2009 Student Awards. The new work pixellates the familiar yellow pencil and uses elements of…
Thinking about earmarks and democratisation →
Stu Berwick told me about this via Twitter: Stimulus Watch. What Stimulus Watch does is to take the list of “Ready-To-Go” projects published by the US Conference of Mayors, convert…
Stop Press for February 16th →
quietube | YouTube without the distractions - If you send people YouTube videos, you might like this. A quick Apt project…
Giz Explains: Why There Isn’t a Perfect Ebook Reader - A great…
Radar Interview with Clay Shirky →
Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward ‘09 conference…
Siftables: digital information on our terms →
Any technology that gets us away from the standard computer monitor and keyboard I’m all for. At TED last week, grad student David Merrill from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s…
The making of the new U2 album →
It is the middle of January this year and Bono is at home in Killiney, County Dublin, with an hour to spare before he heads into town for an afternoon of meetings. “Things are looking good,”…
Stimuluswatch.org; The Falling Cost and... →
Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a…
The automatically updatable book →
One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional. Automatic updates…
The Velocity of Reading (powered by bkkeepr) →
The above is a graph of my reading for the last year from bkkeepr, as generated by the first application powered by the bkkeepr API: The Velocity of Reading.
TVR calculates statistics…
Casa De Botellas: Turning Waste into Modular... →
I’m not usually impressed by people making products or buildings out of trash. Not because it isn’t a good idea — it clearly is — but because most such projects don’t scale well. They’re…
Google makes electricity meters interesting →
Google unveils smart electricity usage monitor software Another interesting move in a nascent space…this from google.org, who announced GoogleWatt, their ‘strategic’ renewable energy…
The Kindle and the End of the End of History →
This morning I was absentmindedly checking out the New York Times’ bits blog coverage of the Kindle 2 launch and saw this: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all…
the invention of everybody / here comes air →
I must do a proper ‘blog all dog-eared pages’ about Steven Johnson’s The Invention Of Air because it’s packed with excellent stuff, but I wanted to mention a particular aspect first….
The Kindle Hardware Tax →
There’s a lot of news about Amazon’s new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don’t want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I’m hoping the early suggestions that…
Why wikis work in organisations →
I’m popping together some marketing material for our wiki consulting ‘suite’, and came across some notes. In my new role as re-poster of stuff I’ve written elsewhere I thought I’d post: Open…
Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains →
Deeply aware of the irony that I half read this whilst a TV was in the room, and kept getting distracted… Wired has an interesting intro to a book on attention: “The other important thing is…
Nate Silver explains racism and elections with... →
This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video…
DESIGN GLOBALLY, PRODUCE LOCALLY →
Resilient communities aren’t only about surviving successive global shocks and instability (retrograde motion). It is also a societal configuration that offers sustained and accelerated…
Painful questions from Dan Ariely →
This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video…
Is sunshine a miracle cure? →
For any expectant mother, a brief stroll in the summer sunshine would seem a pleasant diversion from the rigours of pregnancy, a chance to relax in the warmth and to take in a little fresh…