TheWorld
(via), an interesting visualization of the impact of blogs and websites on the May poll about European Constitution in France. It's done by Franck Ghitalla and Guilhem Fouetillou from the "Université de Compiègne".
Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see how the two 'sides' were structured as competitors: there are not so many links between both! Just few bottlenecks.
Sad news: The Feature (Nokia-owned independent non-branded blog about the mobile Internet) is shutting down today.
Its goal was straightforward: "TheFeature aims to be nothing less than a voice -- an opinionated, independent voice for the mobility community."(...) in that sense, we can say "mission accomplished." It's with a heavy heart, then, that we must reveal this will be the last post on TheFeature.com. When the site launched, 3G was still a far-off, almost pipe dream concept, and GPRS was barely a reality. We helped begin a conversation around these ideas; we now leave that conversation to carry on in the community that supported us. (...)Now is the time for us to step back, and let the conversation and community move forward on its own. It's been a great ride, and we're glad that everyone could join us. So, would the last one out please turn off the lights...
Well, I am sure all the people who published there will keep on doing their work elsewehere amd my hope is that it's just a matter of time before having another platform enriched with new people, new content and new objectives. MobHappy is a step towards this goal!
A new index for fans of city ratings (here, at fab's place or for chris): the density of ducks:
York University has topped a table which gauges 'prowess and brilliance' by the amount of ducks on campus. Oxford and Cambridge do not even figure in the latest poll of duck density, reports The Guardian. York's out-of-town campus has a 50,000 square metre lake, or 49.5 roods, which the duck anoraks prefer to use in their calculations. York's density of 11.6 ducks per rood (roughly 1,011 square metres) is approached only by Loughborough with 8.5, according to the survey's website, duckdensity.org.uk. Both Warwick and Leeds have made impressive progress over the past year. Hannah Love, spokeswoman for Leeds University where a formal pond in the Chancellor's Court has helped increase duck density to 7.0, said: "It's good to see our waterfowl recognised in the updated duck density table. "This year's new brood are enjoying the attention from staff and students. "We're keeping an eye on them and hope they enjoy their time at Leeds before flying off into the big wide world." Duck Density's organisers, originally from York university, promote the table as "the ultimate mark of a university's prowess and brilliance."
It sounds good, update your indexes! Update: and check duckdensity!
(via), the Institute of Infinitely Small Things is lauching a new interesting project that aims at creting a database open to submissions of corporate commands from researchers around the world.
WHAT IS A CORPORATE COMMAND? A Corporate Command is an instruction work, a call to action in the form of an imperative: "Just Do It" "Turn on the Future" "Live without Limits" "Tap into great taste" "Think different" "Ride the light" "Live Like You Mean It" It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function at the scale of the infinitely small. (...) By compiling, tabulating, concretizing and enacting these commands in the International Database of Corporate Commands (IDCC), the Institute for Infinitely Small Things seeks to better understand the mechanisms behind this deployment of power and its larger cultural ramifications.
Via Mobile research forum newsletter, the fortwayne gazette:
Phone companies in the US have eliminated more than a million traditional pay phones in the past eight years, many of them in phone booths. Now, some restaurants, libraries and other businesses are slowly bringing back phone booths, without the phone this time. Users bring their own mobile phone and can talk as loud as they want without bothering anybody else or being asked to step outside. The quest for privacy drives 98 per cent of Americans to go to another room or outside when talking on a cell phone, according to a recent survey. Some retreat to a restroom to make calls. But few things are more irritating than having to listen to the sound of toilets flushing during an important conversation - 77 per cent of the survey respondents said they were subjected to such toilet gaffes. In Europe, where cell phone use is ubiquitous, an industry has cropped up to make and promote modern cell phone booths. Isomax Dekorative Laminate AG in Austria, is proposing that its laminate cladding boards could be used to make a booth with retractable walls. Antti Evavaara, a Finnish furniture designer, has sold hundreds of mobile-phone boxes for several thousand euros each since 2002. The booths, dubbed 'Silence', are designed for waiting areas, airports and hotel lobbies. They resemble C-shaped chairs with clear side panels. Evavaara recently announced plans to mass-produce the box in as many as 67 colours. The most popular colour so far: bright red.
This morning, I was amazed by the new design of the Lausanne Public Transport vending machines. Instead of putting a map with names of the different places (the most common way to give a global representation of space), they put a list of names (bus/metro stops) in alphabetical order. This limits travel hack (like you know the area where you're heading but not the place's name). Besides, our university has 3 or 4 stops but they did not put the name of the university, they just put the names of the stops!
This morning, I was amazed by the new design of the Lausanne Public Transport vending machines. Instead of putting a map with names of the different places (the most common way to give a global representation of space), they put a list of names (bus/metro stops) in alphabetical order. This limits travel hack (like you know the area where you're heading but not the place's name). Besides, our university has 3 or 4 stops but they did not put the name of the university, they just put the names of the stops!
Last firday, walking in the streets of Lyon, I found this interesting picture, I think Larry Hyman (researcher at University of California, Berkeley) made it when he worked in France...
(ego-trip) My side-project with roby: the french RSS aggregator rss4you has been quoted in Liberation. They also quote our friend jerome :)
RSS
Ce fichier texte résume le contenu d'un site ou d'un blog et permet à un utilisateur de consulter les flux provenant de multiples sources d'information différentes sans avoir à visiter chacun des sites. De nombreux blogs compilent automatiquement les actualités publiées par d'autres.
www.ifeedyou.com/ou www.rss4you.com/
Via smart mobs, this news:
Cities identified as "cool" or creative by Richard Florida have more bloggers, according to Rob Goodspeed's analysis. These cities also have robust local online communities like Craigslist and Upcoming
Not really suprising but it's nice to read a study about it (here is the pdf).
In fact, the top 10 cities with the most bloggers included the top 8 from Florida’s list of centers of the creative class. My theory: cities with the richest local online culture (measured in number of blogs, and use of a select group of other geographically-bound websites) will reflect those cities with the highest numbers of creative class people. In short, the cities with the most blogs will be the most economically successful in the future.
The wwf.org revealed that:
ministers from 13 European Union countries are contaminated with dozens of industrial chemicals according to results of blood tests released today. Fourteen Environment and Health Ministers tested by WWF in June 2004 have a total of 55 industrial chemicals in their blood.The chemicals found in the Ministers include those used in fire-resistant sofas, non-stick pans, grease proof-pizza boxes, flexible PVC, fragrances and pesticides. Some were banned decades ago though many are still in use today.
Karl Wagner, Director of WWF’s DetoX Campaign. "It is hard to believe that legislators have been willing to allow this uncontrolled experiment to continue for so many years."
You can download the ministers blood test pictures (well...) as well as different factsheets.
Of course, tommorow, each national newspaper will tackle the issue of the Worlf Economic Forum Annual Competitiveness Report. Finland will smile, France will argue that the ratings does not take some indexes into account, Taiwan will tease China, Switzerland will laugh at the UE... But guy! it's just a rating!
I really like this kind of story, as told by MK:
Some cowboys left some guitars behind in Hawaii in about 1792, and the result was Hawaiian Slack Key guitar playing. The cowboys didn't leave behind any instructions on how to tune the guitars, so each person who picked up a guitar and taught themselves to play also learned their own individual way of tuning the guitar. These methods of tuning became highly prized, and musicians would loosen their strings when they put their guitars down, so no one could steal their tuning. Tuning styles were only shared within families, and this created a wonderful kind of family history, with some musicians able to re-tune their guitars and play in the style of their father, and re-tune again and play in the style of their aunt, et cetera.
It is a slightly different but it reminds me this other story I already told here (writtent by Miroslav Holub):
"The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland. It began to snow immediately, snowed for two days and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered: he had dispatched his own people to death. But the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps but of the Pyrenees."
The common point here is the way we use artefacts and the inferences we draw from them :) Human beings are a really powerfull 'machine' that interprete meanings!
Patel and Groen (1993) : "it may be illogical to compare apples and oranges, but it is possible to put them in the same basket. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to conclude that a theoretical framework is superior to another. "
Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters by Ron Eglash
he development of technological expertise requires not only financial resources, but also cultural capital. Nerd identity has been a critical gateway to this technocultural access, mediating personal identities in ways that both maintain normative boundaries of power and offer sites for intervention. This paper examines the figure of the nerd in relation to race and gender identity, and explores the ways in which attempts to circumvent its normative gate-keeping function can both succeed and fail.
Read in IHT, Pentagon blocks site for voters outside the US.
Internet service providers in at least 25 countries - including Yahoo Broadband in Japan, Wanadoo in France, BT Yahoo Broadband in Britain and Telefónica in Spain - have been denied access to the site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, apparently to protect it from hackers. In an e-mail addressed to a person in France who had tried to access the Web site, the Federal Voting Assistance Program's Web manager, Susan Leader, wrote: “We are sorry you cannot access www.fvap.gov. Unfortunately, Wanadoo France has had its access blocked to U.S. government Web sites due to Wanadoo users constantly attempting to hack these sites. We do not expect the block to be lifted."
DO COWS improve the view? This question is seriously taken by the swiss government according to the economist. The question actually is rather how much do cows improve the view and where do they provide most value for money? One justification for the subsidy is that cows eat young trees, and fewer trees mean better vistas of the sort beloved by tourists.
To help answer these questions, Kai Nagel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have developed computer models of the Alps and populated them with virtual tourists (or “autonomous agents” in computer-speak) that can wander the electronic landscape. The agents are programmed to behave, as far as possible, like real tourists, and to record their impressions as they go.
The use of rss4you is increasing, we now have 388 registered users. It's funny that this tool is used without any media coverage or advertisement. I wish to have more times to take care of this but... It gets 8070 hits in google, that's cool for such an submarine project.
It's been a long time I did not play with Touchgraph. Here is the rendering obtained from a google query on pasta and vinegar:
Euro Foo Camp seemed to have an interesting programme
Better Living Through RSS - Brain Hacks - Size Matters: Large Format Cameras - Guerrilla Evangilism - Tell stories with maps - Blogging in Europe - Using a mobile phone to control the BBC^W^W people