Research
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Fun with tropo
Right now every FM and TV station in Santa Barbara and San Diego can be heard in both places. Between them lays more than 200 miles of ocean across a curved earth. I’m not there right now, but I see what’s happening remotely over my TV set top box. (Thank you, SlingBox.) But, more importantly,… Continue reading
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Sports as a propaganda laboratory
The other day a friend shared this quote from Michael Choukas‘ Propaganda Comes of Age (Public Affairs Press, 1965): This is not the propagandist’s aim. For him the validity of an image must be measured not by the degree of its fidelity, but by the response it may evoke. If it will induce the action he wishes,… Continue reading
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Figuring @Flickr
Here’s a hunk of what one set (aka Album) in my Flickr stream looks like: And here are what my stats on Flickr looked like earlier today (or yesterday, since Flickr is on GMT and it’s tomorrow there): I ended up with 32,954 views, with no one of my 49,000+ photos getting more than 56 views.… Continue reading
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Giving respect to brand advertising
I wrote the first half of the following two years ago for a name-brand Web magazine that decided not to run it. You can guess why. I later turned it into a shorter piece for Wharton‘s Future of Advertising collection. For this post I took out some cruft and added a new second half. As usual,… Continue reading
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What do sites need from social login buttons?
Not want. Need. If a site has one of these… … what is the least information they need from the user? Seems to me that “social” login buttons like these are meant for the convenience of the user. But too often liberties are taken with them. For example, here is what one company says in its… Continue reading
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Weather vs. Flying
Here in the temperate zones, summer is beaches and picnics and biking and dinner on the deck outside. It is also thunderstorms and airport delays. Right now a line of thunderheads is sliding northeastward across New Jersey. Here is how it looks to FlightAware‘s map of aviation and weather activity for Newark Liberty Airport: Notice… Continue reading
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Spying on your ass
Quantified toilets. Seems to be a project out of @CHI2014, going on now in Toronto. Continue reading
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Into the dark
The power is out and won’t be back for awhile. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices… Continue reading
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Wanted: Just-the-Facts Maps
In Google sets out future for Maps — Lays down gauntlet to Nokia with plans for personalized, context-aware and ’emotional’ maps in future, in Rethink Wireless, Caroline Gabriel begins this way: Google may be feeling the heat from an unlikely source, Nokia, at least in its critical Maps business. The search giant has put location awareness… Continue reading
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Plantings in pictures
It’s interesting to see where photos end up (or start out, or re-start out) when one puts them in position to be used and re-used with minimized friction. The one above, of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that supplies electricity to Los Angeles, and which I shot from a flight overhead in January 2009,… Continue reading
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Digging Hart Island, New York’s Million-Corpse Potter’s Field
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. — Samuel Johnson Visitors to New York’s Orchard Beach (at the top of the photo above) probably don’t know that the low wooded island offshore will, at the current rate, contain a million buried human bodies, if it doesn’t already. The site is Hart… Continue reading
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Pirate radio lives, big time, in New York
Last Saturday evening I was walking up Wadsworth Avenue in Manhattan, a few blocks north of 181st Street, when I passed a group of people sitting sitting on the steps of an apartment building. They were talking, drinking, eating snacks and listening to a boom box set to 94.9FM. A disc jockey chattered in Spanish,… Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting… Continue reading
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Time for public radio ratings winners to take a bow
I like and subscribe to Radio INK, which is the main way I stay current with what’s happening in mainstream radio. And Radio INK loves WTOP, the news station in Washington. Do a search for site:http://www.radioink.com WTOP and you’ll get many pages of praise running from Radio INK to WTOP — all of it, I… Continue reading
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The biggest picture
I want to plug something I am very much looking forward to, and encourage you strongly to attend. It’s called The Overview Effect, and it’s the premiere of a film by that title. Here are the details: Friday, December 7, 2012 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm Askwith Lecture Hall Longfellow Hall 13 Appian Way Harvard University Cambridge, MA The world-premiere… Continue reading
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Let’s name the crossover point
Over dinner in Amsterdam recently, George Dyson — who knows a thing or two about the history of computing — told me that a crossover of sorts has happened, or is happening now. The crossover is between a time when we erased storage media to make room for fresh data and a time when we… Continue reading
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The only issue that matters
Geologists have an informal name for the history of human influence on the Earth. They call it the Anthropocene. It makes sense. We have been raiding the earth for its contents, and polluting its atmosphere, land and oceans for as long as we’ve been here, and it shows. By any objective perspective other than our… Continue reading
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Adaptive myopia
When I was a kid I had near-perfect vision. I remember being able to read street signs and license plates at a distance, and feeling good about that. But I don’t think that was exceptional. Unless we are damaged in some way, the eyes we are born with tend to be optically correct. Until… what?… Continue reading