New “About” on my blog
November 23, 2017 at 5:21 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off on New “About” on my blogJust a quick heads up for anyone who still reads this: I posted a new About Me page on my site (the other one – it’s kicking off again).
Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving! Are you giving thanks? Are you thankful? I hope you are. All things considered, I am. Very.
My review of California Design, 1930-1965
April 4, 2014 at 5:41 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off on My review of California Design, 1930-1965Here’s a link to my article about the exhibition California Design, 1930-1965, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (aka LACMA) and is currently on view at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum. It will be published in North Shore Art*Throb next week, but you can read an advance copy on my blog: Living and Selling the Dream: Exploring Lifestyle Aspirations through California Design.
Did anyone notice that there was no Sunday Links Post?
February 26, 2014 at 2:30 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off on Did anyone notice that there was no Sunday Links Post?For years I’ve been using Diigo, another third-party service (and a very good one), to gather links to interesting articles. They would then get published to my Berkman blog once a week as the Sunday Links Post. But the other week I noticed that something wasn’t working, and consequently nothing got bookmarked. I missed that Sunday’s entry. (I’ve missed other Sunday entries, but those were on purpose. This one wasn’t.) It made me think about how Boris Mann is on the right track when he controls his links directly, via his blog. (See his comment on my blog post here.)
That “fail” with the Sunday links post seems to me part of the conversation about keeping stuff on your own site(s).
Oddly, most of the conversation sparked by my Feb. 20 post happened on Facebook.
So I took all those words and re-posted them to my blog. Check it out – and you don’t even have to log in to FB…
Blogging has changed for me. A lot. But maybe not enough.
February 20, 2014 at 5:00 pm | In yulelogStories | 3 CommentsIt’s not really bye-bye Berkman blog, but I have had my own domain for ages – and today I decided to post something there.
It’s about my perceptions of how blogging and online conversations have changed over the years.
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
February 16, 2014 at 3:30 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
David Simon on America as a Horror Show on Vimeo
Must-watch.
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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.”
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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?
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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”).
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The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to Say
Good stuff.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
February 9, 2014 at 9:01 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
A Very Brief History of Why Americans Hate Their Commutes – Martin Wachs – The Atlantic Cities
Zoning.
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As mechanization of transit made it ever cheaper, safer, and cleaner, reformers and idealists seeking to overcome the “congestion evil” pushed for lower residential densities and deliberate suburbanization for more than a century. In 1909, at the First National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion, speaker after speaker advocated the introduction of zoning ordinances and the extension of transit routes to outlying areas, hoping to lower urban densities by enabling people to travel longer distances to work.
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Zoning (again). This is reason #9, and it seems the most compelling.
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Zoning laws. There are many differences between land-use planning systems in the United States and Europe. Europeans tend to allow a greater mix of uses in their residential zones, thus keeping trip distances shorter. For example, in Germany, a residential zone can include doctors’ offices, cafes, corner stores, or apartment buildings. By contrast, single family residential zones in the United States typically forbid those uses. Zoning in Germany also occurs for smaller land areas—almost at the block level—facilitating shorter trips than in U.S. cities, where zones tend to be much larger. And while most U.S. zoning codes still require a minimum number of parking spots, many European countries operate with maximum numbers to limit parking.
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Ink on Paper: Some Notes on Note-taking | Wray Herbert
Fascinating (and not too surprising).
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Apparently there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing. And there is something about ink and paper that prompts students to go beyond merely hearing and recording new information — and instead to process and reframe information in their own words, with or without the aid of asterisks and checks and arrows.
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“Structured” parking as an alternative to the awful parking lot? Good idea. Not so sure about the “horizontal skyscraper” idea, aka the “fatscraper”…
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Building structured parking is thus seen as an intermediary step in that process. In the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge, architectural firms were asked to be creative in their designs, to conjure places that would not simply store the cars, but open up new possibilities for public use of the space. Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design envisioned a “horizontal skyscraper” relating to Main Street in Ronkonkoma; dub Studios submitted a shared parking scheme in Patchogue; LTL Architects rendered a parking garage with a landscaped terraced rooftop cascading towards the rail line in Westbury.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
February 2, 2014 at 4:02 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Google dreams up free taxi rides to stores – SmartPlanet
Wow… Interesting implications also (aside from data/ algorithms) for online v. “irl” shopping/ consumption/ commerce.
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…would it be worth it for businesses to subsidize the trips of individual customers? That’s exactly what Google has invented, an algorithm that determines “the cost of transportation and the potential profit from a completed transaction using a number of real-time calculations.” According to the patent, it would determine that using information like the customer’s location, the customer’s route to the store and most likely form of transportation needed to get there, and the price competitors are willing to pay to get customers in their stores.
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Gentrification isn’t bad for the poor – Quartz
Well, debates about gentrification aside, it’s clear that SF certainly did NOT build enough housing to accommodate the influx of new residents. (Note: in the article, the paragraph below is studded with links to sources.)
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Gentrification, the term of art for an influx of new residents into an urban neighborhood that typically drives up rents, is controversial in many wealthy cities. It’s often blamed for driving out poorer residents. But when researchers try to prove it, facts are hard to find. Any number of outlets have reported on studies by Columbia University’s Lance Freeman and researchers at the University of Colorado and Duke University who find that gentrification doesn’t drive out a rising neighborhood’s former residents. It even stands to benefit them financially.
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Evgeny Morozov’s response to Sascha Lobo : More political interference! – Medien – FAZ
Excellent piece from Morozov.
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…as everything becomes interconnected – with tiny sensors and modems – “the Internet” will literally be everywhere. But if one accepts the thesis that the “Internet” is just a never-ending exercise in purification, whereby domains that were previously contentious and political are converted into uncontroversial technological domains that are supposed to behave in accordance with the out-of-control logic of the “Internet”– it’s not so hard to see what awaits us: the end of politics altogether, as the only remaining reason for regulating this newly “interconnected world” would be to promote “innovation” (a nice euphemism for the business interests of Silicon Valley) rather than an ambitious social and political agenda. When “the Internet” is everywhere, politics is nowhere.
(…)
…the only way to promote alternative uses of ebooks or search engines or social networks in ways that would not depend too heavily on the seemingly free services offered by Silicon Valley is by developing a new industrial policy that would inject billions of dollars into public information infrastructure. And we don’t want that infrastructure to be managed by the same oligopolies only with European names; it has to be run in a decentralized and civic manner, with citizens owning their own data from the start. It’s not digital optimism that we must cultivate – rather, it’s optimism in public institutions and a renewed faith in politics. Not exactly a very popular messages during the times of austerity.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
January 26, 2014 at 12:14 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Gardiner Expressway at the crossroads: Hume | Toronto Star
This article is about an expressway in Toronto, but Christopher Hume’s closing sentences apply to so many other places and situations: low expectations, self-perpetuating, lack of will to re-invest…
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A reason was the low expectations Torontonians had for that part of town. It is viewed as a wasteland, largely because that’s what it has been for so long. Ironically, the Gardiner is at least responsible for that.But as the waterfront comes back to life, it’s time to demand more. People now live in neighbourhoods that until recently were industrial.
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A Circular economy: selling a product’s benefits instead of the product itself…
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With this in mind, my company is redesigning its products and considering how to capture their residual value. At the same time, it is shifting from a transaction- to a relationship-based business model – one that entails closer cooperation with customers and suppliers. And it is changing its corporate culture to emphasize long-term solutions. None of these changes is easy to implement, but all of them are necessary.
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Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent. Here’s why – Quartz
Interesting historical background here:
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Economists think German housing policy struck a much better balance between government involvement and private investment than in many other countries. For instance, in the UK, when the government gave housing subsidies to encourage the building of homes after the war, only public-sector entities, local governments, and non-profit developers were eligible for them. That effectively squeezed the private sector out of the rental market. In Germany, “the role of public policy was to follow a third way that involved striking a sensitive balance between ‘letting the market rip’ in an uncontrolled manner and strangling it off by heavy-handed intervention,” wrote economist Jim Kemeny, of the German approach to housing policy.
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Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report | Wired Design | Wired.com
Ok, but we’re still being mediated *by* technology, subtly primed to respond to its dictates. Would be interesting to think about how that manifests in a supposedly more people-oriented computer technology as depicted in Her… (I’m just thinking about this in the terms laid out by Ursula M. Franklin, viz. growth-oriented and production-oriented technologies, whereby the former is holistic, people-centered, and the latter is geared toward efficiency and fulfilling the needs of production.)
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It’s not just that Her, the movie, is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is more people-centric. The world Her shows us is one where the technology has receded, or one where we’ve let it recede. It’s a world where the pendulum has swung back the other direction, where a new generation of designers and consumers have accepted that technology isn’t an end in itself–that it’s the real world we’re supposed to be connecting to.
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Why Do the Smartest Cities Have the Smallest Share of Cars? – Derek Thompson – The Atlantic Cities
Is it true?
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The Atlantic has called “peak car”—not once but twice. We have repeatedly explained why young Americans “don’t care about owning” a vehicle. We predicted a long-term decline of auto sales, and, in a dramatic moment, essentially announced “the end of car ownership,” generally.We had strong data. Perhaps we had strong biases, too.
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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
January 19, 2014 at 11:28 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Susan Crawford gets it.
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The theoretical downside is that the Internet devolves into a kind of “pay to play” system, with smaller companies tending to be squeezed out, and prices tending to rise overall.That is the dystopia envisioned by people like Susan Crawford, a visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “We’ve got very powerful market actors in America who want to make more money from the same infrastructure, without expanding it,” Crawford says. “The way they do that is to divide markets and then steadily charge more. And on the other side, they want to charge people who want to reach subscribers different rates.”
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This Sex Offender-Spotting App Sounds Like a Really Bad Idea | Motherboard
What with Google buying Nest (learning about people’s private preferences for how they heat or cool their homes – potential privacy invasion, much?), and apps like this (NameTag), you have to wonder where we’re headed. Creepy creepy.
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Perhaps the most cynical part of the whole idea, though, is that the creators do plan to offer people a way to avoid being face-scanned like this—but it looks like you have to sign up to their site to do it. “People will soon be able to login to www.NameTag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others,” Tussy explained in the release. Is the true idea behind NameTag, then, a social network that you have to opt out of?
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Something worth reading from Kunstler (for a change).
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To me, the danger of a President Christie is that he is about the last politician one might expect to recognize the nation’s tragic predicament and he is exactly the figure who will mount America’s deadly final campaign to sustain the unsustainable. He represents what amounts to a sort of national debt slavery: We will pay any price to stay where history has marooned us. One vivid example of this was Governor Christie’s decision in 2010 to cancel New Jersey’s participation in building a new commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River to relieve the unsustainable pressure on the existing 100-year-old train tunnels. He derided the project as “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s.” Christie then diverted $4 billion from the tunnel project to New Jersey’s transportation trust fund in a bid to keep the state’s gas tax the second-lowest in the country. (New Jersey’s transit system, meanwhile, ranks among the country’s worst, and Christie has cut its funding.)This little maneuver highlights one of the nation’s most lamentable political failures of recent decades: the lack of will to invest in public transportation, in particular, upgrading and rehabilitating our conventional passenger railroad system. Governor Christie represents the majority of Americans who have no idea how close we are to the twilight of mass automobile motoring.
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The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency’ | The Nation
File under “Uh-oh”?
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NASA scientists, along with others, are learning that the Arctic permafrost—and its stored carbon—may not be as permanently frosted as its name implies. Research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign to study how climate change is affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle. He told NASA, “Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures—as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years. As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”
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