• David Simon on America as a Horror Show on Vimeo

  Must-watch.
  QUOTE
  David Simon, creator of the TV series ‘The Wire,’ talks with Bill about America’s capitalism crisis. It’s a reality check from a journalist who uses TV drama to report on America from the bottom up. “The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many more will be marginalized and destroyed.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: bill_moyers david_simon socialcritique socialjustice video vimeo

• Startup Datacoup Will Pay You $8 a Month If Your Feed It Data from Facebook, Twitter, and Your Credit Card | MIT Technology Review

  Ugh. And also: If my data is so valuable (and it is!), why should I get paid a measly $8 per month for it? Hmm?
  QUOTE
  But Hogan claims that what Datacoup collects can be especially useful to advertisers because few data providers can combine traces of a person’s online activity with a record of their spending activity. “Both of those are valuable; when you layer one on the other you unlock more value, and there’s no way to do that other than from the user themselves,” he says. Validation for this idea—and competition for Datacoup—comes from Twitter and Facebook, which work with data broker Datalogix to link people’s social media activity and the things they buy (see “Facebook Starts Sharing What It Knows About You”).
  UNQUOTE

  tags: big_data data mit_techreview startups

• The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to Say

  Good stuff.
  QUOTE
  “In 1981,” explains Giordano, “LEGOs were ‘Universal Building Sets’ and that’s exactly what they were…for boys and girls. Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.” (…)
  “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I am today. It contributed to me becoming a physician and inspired me to want to help others achieve health and wellness. I co-own two medical centers in Seattle. Doctor kits used to be for all children, but now they are on the boys’ aisle. I simply believe that they should be marketed to all children again, and the same with LEGOs and other toys.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: lego gender toys girls opportunity

• 2014’s Endless Snow Has at Least Been Good for Transportation Nerds – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

  This is great: curb extensions or neckdowns are ways to make streets safer for pedestrians. With the many snowfalls we’ve had this winter, it’s possible to document how plowed snow creates neckdowns, called sneckdowns (and documented via hashtag on Twitter), proving that streets don’t need to be as wide as they all too often are.
  QUOTE
  Way back in 2006, New York–based Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms shot a video showing how heavy snowfall creates natural neckdowns, as plows push snow to the curb and cars take only the space that they need — leaving the untouched snow to mark the space that maybe isn’t all necessary for cars. He expanded on the concept in another film in 2011. Then, this winter, thanks to frequent heavy snowfalls across most of the country, Eckerson and a few like-minded people started talking about the concept again. They decided that they needed a catchy name for the snowy neckdowns in order to help spread the concept on social media. Soon enough, a hashtag was born.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: curb_extensions neckdowns sneckdowns snow pedestrians atlantic_cities sarah_goodyear

• Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present | Underwire | Wired.com

  Our relationship to the present does seem altered by the omni-availability of the past…
  QUOTE
  This omnipresence of the past has weird effects on contemporary culture. Take any genre of music, from death metal to R&B to chillwave, and the cloud directs you not just to similar artists in the present but to deep wells of influence from the past. Yes, people still like new things. But the past gets as much preference as the present—Mozart, for example, has more than 100,000 followers on Spotify. In a history glut, the idea of fashionability in music erodes, because new songs sit on the same shelf as songs recorded five, 25, and 55 years ago, all of them waiting to be discovered. In this eternal present, everything can be made contemporary.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: history wired_magazine paul_ford internet_archive

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 02|16|14 at 3:30 pm. Filed under: links.

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