"So much on what is online today is still a legacy of the production of the paper", said Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, named recently by Leslie Hinton, theWall Street Journal (Robert Murdoch's) publisher and Dow Jones CEO , as a "digital vampire",
Fascinating twitter visualization. It's scanning tweetfeeds for the phrase "Just landed in..." or "Just arrived in..." and tracks the location the Tweet was sent from.
The user's original location is found from their profile and an airplane flight path pops up on the 3D map of the world.
Looks pretty clear in which country people are using the twitter the most : USA is on the 1st place, Europe comes after. Might be useful for the News companies.
Thousands of people tuned in on May 12, 2009 to watch the film Us Now and view the launch events’ panel discussions in London and Harvard coordinated by FutureGov and the British Council.
Us Now is a one hour film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. It tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the existing notion of hierarchy. For the first time, it brings together the fore-most thinkers in the field of participative governance to describe the future of government.
Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.
Contributors: Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Charles Leadbeater, William Heath, Martin Sticksl, Lee Bryant, Tom Steinberg, Ed Miliband, George Osborne, Saul Albert, Mikey Weinkove, Sunny Hundal, Sophia Parker, JP Rangaswami, Paul Miller, Becky Hogge, Matthew Taylor, MT Rainy, Giles Andrews, Paul Miller, Shane Kelly, Liam Daish
The film follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans;
This would be a perfect car for Paris. Aiming for the sweet spot between the comfort of a private vehicle and the efficiency of public transportation, the City Car from MIT's Media Lab is a stackable electric car that can be checked out like a luggage cart at the airport, then returned to any station around the city.
Electric motors in each wheel eliminate the need for a mechanical drivetrain, and these 5-ft.-long (1.5 m) two-seaters zip along at 55 m.p.h. (about 90 km/h). Available: 2011
The Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab is working on two low-cost electric vehicles that it hopes will revolutionize mass transit and help alleviate pollution. Next week, the group will unveil a prototype of its foldable electric scooter at the EICMA Motorcycle Show, in Milan. A prototype for the team's foldable electric car, called the City Car, is slated to follow next year.
The MIT group sees the vehicles as the linchpin in a strategy that aims to mitigate pollution with electric power, expand limited public space by folding and stacking vehicles like shopping carts, and alleviate congestion by letting people rent and return the vehicles to racks located near transportation hubs, such as train stations, airports, and bus depots.
"We're looking at urban personal mobility in a much more sustainable way than the private automobile provides," says William Mitchell, director of the Smart Cities research group. The group's strategy will efficiently solve the "last mile" problem without losing the virtues of the private automobile, Mitchell says.
The last mile is that inconvenient distance between any major transit stop and a person's final destination. While a traditional automobile provides mobility on demand and gets you to your destination, its negative externalities--congestion and pollution--seem intractable.
At the heart of these vehicles is an omnidirectional robot wheel that the team has developed. The wheel encases an electric-drive motor, as well as suspension, steering, and braking systems. With no engine or mechanical parts between the wheels and the driver's controls, the system offers great flexibility in design. The driver can, in fact, fold the car up (see below image). Six to eight folded and stacked City Cars can fit into one conventional parking space. General Motors sponsored the development of the car.
The wheels also enable incredible maneuverability. Instead of making U-turns, the car can spin on the spot, and when the driver turns each wheel 90 degrees, the car can parallel-park by moving sideways.
"The idea for a wheel motor has been around for a long time," says Peter Schmitt, designer of the wheel. But Schmitt says that the advantage of his design is that the wheel is controlled by software instead of by mechanical coupling.
The MIT team's vision of deploying these cars in a shared-use, personal-mobility system isn't new either. In Lyon, France, a company called Velo'v recently introduced a shared-use bicycle system throughout the city. Based on its initial success, the Velo'v system is being extended to Paris with approximately 2,000 stacks and 20,000 bicycles.
Another business model that the team has looked at is the Zip Car rental system. Zip Car is a rental service based on a two-way model: customers have to return the car to the same location from which they picked it up. They also have to reserve cars online in advance.
The MIT team says that the Zip Car two-way model is great for neighborhoods where people have to boomerang in and out to run errands. But in a dense city starved for parking, the MIT designers see great virtue in their one-way system, which lets people move from spot to spot without returning to their point of origin. In the ideal City Car scheme, vehicles can be rented from one rack and returned to another.
Still, Robin Chase, the founder and former CEO of Zip Car, has some reservations about the MIT group's system. She says that she's worried about logistical and operational problems, such as the even distribution of vehicles. With a one-way model, too many could wind up in one location. The company must then pay for trucks to redistribute the cars or scooters throughout the city. Chase adds that when she was with Zip Car, she noticed that customers were reluctant to adopt new technologies. "Our electric car was our least rented vehicle," she says. "People didn't seem to trust the technology."
The MIT team is not deterred. It's looking at Taipei as an ideal location in which to roll out the electric scooter, which was developed in partnership with SYM, a major Taiwanese scooter manufacturer. "Taipei is teeming with scooters," says Ryan Chin, a designer with the Smart Cities group.
Currently, there are nearly as many scooters in Taiwan as there are people. During a typical rush hour, traffic lanes overflow, and riders wear surgical masks to filter the pollution from exhaust. Some three million scooters lie abandoned throughout the country.
"If a shared scooter is used by 10 different people a day, you'll reduce the number of scooters on the road by half," Chin says.
With a successful run at the Milan motorcycle show, Chin says that his group's 50-kilogram scooter could be mass-produced and deployed within three years.
A Carbon-Free, Stackable Rental Car An MIT group hopes that its foldable electric vehicles will cut pollution, and ease congestion. By Michael Patrick Gibson
"This is by no means a complete model. I worry that I’ll never be able to effectively manage all the pieces of me that I’m absent-mindedly handing out." Francis Shanahan Identity Fragmentation [Nov 2007, no Twitter yet!]
Pour son exposition à la galerie Almine Rech, John Giorno a choisi de présenter un ensemble de dessins inédits ainsi que plusieurs peintures dont l’une d’elles, We Gave A Party For the Gods fut récemment montrée au Centre Georges Pompidou dans l’exposition "Traces du sacré".
L’exposition sera également composée de deux vidéos Welcoming The Flowers et Down Comes The Rain dans lesquelles le poète-performeur se met en scène.
From January, 10 2009 till March 7, 2009 at Galerie Almine Rech, 19 rue de Saintonge, 75003 Paris - France
From December 18 to 31, 2008 the exhibition “Dans la nuit, des images” (Images in the night) at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, presents a panorama of European audiovisual and multimedia creation.
Around 130 artists exhibit videos, movies, photos. Among them: Bill Viola, Michael Snow, William Kentridge, Charles Sandison, Anri Sala, Robert Wilson, Nam Juin Paik, William Klein, Chris Marker, Rosemary Trockel, Christian Marclay, Ryoji Ikeda, Liu, Fortuné, Grasso, legendary animators Hannah and Barbera (creators of The Flintstones and The Jetsons), the world's oldest working filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who just turned 100 etc.
“Dans la nuit, des images” includes some 140 works, representing 10 years of contemporary creation from the 27 European Union member states and numerous other countries.
“A selection of iconic works using light projection - photographs, films, videos, digital imagery and interactive installations from plasma screens to giant projections - will document the technological innovations that have become part of artistic creation over the past ten years.” (press release).
Cover story from December 2008 edition of The Futurist magazine OUTLOOK 2009 More sex, fewer antidepressants; more transparency online, less privacy in real life. These are among the World Future Society’s latest roundup of more than 70 forecasts for your changing world. PDF available
Forecast # 1: Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano storage capacity is almost limitless, all conversation and activity will be recorded and recoverable. — Gene Stephens, “Cybercrime in the Year 2025,” THE FUTURIST July-Aug 2008.
Forecast #2: Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. Emerging scientific disciplines (notably genomics, nanotechnology, and other microsciences) could pave the way for a bioattack. Bacteria and viruses could be altered to increase their lethality or to evade antibiotic treatment.— Barry Kellman, “Bioviolence: A Growing Threat,” THE FUTURIST May-June 2008.
Forecast #3: The car's days as king of the road will soon be over. More powerful wireless communication that reduces demand for travel, flying delivery drones to replace trucks, and policies to restrict the number of vehicles owned in each household are among the developments that could thwart the automobile’s historic dominance on the environment and culture. If current trends were to continue, the world would have to make way for a total of 3 billion vehicles on the road by 2025. — Thomas J. Frey, “Disrupting the Automobile’s Future,” THE FUTURIST, Sep-Oct 2008.
Forecast #4: Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized. An increase in unusual college majors may foretell the growth of unique new career specialties. Instead of simply majoring in business, more students are beginning to explore niche majors such as sustainable business, strategic intelligence, and entrepreneurship. Other unusual majors that are capturing students' imaginations: neuroscience and nanotechnology, computer and digital forensics, and comic book art. Scoff not: The market for comic books and graphic novels in the United States has grown 12% since 2006. —THE FUTURIST, World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2008.
Forecast #5: There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world's legal systems will be networked. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a database of local and national laws for more than 50 participating countries, will grow to include more than 100 counties by 2010. The database will lay the groundwork for a more universal understanding of the diversity of laws between nations and will create new opportunities for peace and international partnership.— Joseph N. Pelton, "Toward a Global Rule of Law: A Practical Step Toward World Peace," THE FUTURIST Nov-Dec 2007.
Forecast #6: The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will — in the twenty-first century — be what the space race was in the previous century. Humanity is ready to pursue biomedical and genetic enhancement, says UCLA professor Gregory Stock, the money is already being invested, but, he says, “We'll also fret about these things — because we're human, and it's what we do.” — Gregory Stock quoted in THE FUTURIST, Nov-Dec 2007.
Forecast #7: Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it's acquired. An individual's professional knowledge is becoming outdated at a much faster rate than ever before. Most professions will require continuous instruction and retraining. Rapid changes in the job market and work-related technologies will necessitate job education for almost every worker. At any given moment, a substantial portion of the labor force will be in job retraining programs. — Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, "Trends Shaping Tomorrow's World, Part Two," THE FUTURIST May-June 2008.
Forecast #8: Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030. As more of the world's population lives in cities, rapid development to accommodate them will make existing environmental and socioeconomic problems worse. Epidemics will be more common due to crowded dwelling units and poor sanitation. Global warming may accelerate due to higher carbon dioxide output and loss of carbon-absorbing plants. — Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, “Trends Shaping Tomorrow's World,” THE FUTURIST Mar-Apr 2008.
Forecast #9: The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow. Popular support for religious government is declining in places like Iraq, according to a University of Michigan study. The researchers report that in 2004 only one-fourth of respondents polled believed that Iraq would be a better place if religion and politics were separated. By 2007, that proportion was one-third. Separate reports reveal a countertrend in China. — World Trends & Forecasts, THE FUTURIST Nov-Dec 2007.
Forecast #10: Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030. Electrification has expanded around the world, from 40% connected in 1970 to 73% in 2000, and may reach 83% of the world's people by 2030. Electricity is fundamental to raising living standards and access to the world's products and services. Impoverished areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa still have low rates of electrification; Uganda is just 3.7% electrified. — Andy Hines, “Global Trends in Culture, Infrastructure, and Values,” Sep-Oct 2008.
Cover story from December 2008 edition of The Futurist magazine
