February 2012
17 posts
1 tag
What makes a city 'livable'?
Long-term resident of Sana’a, Sabrina Faber, has developed a rainwater aggregation system which catches water from the city’s flat-roofed buildings, siphoning it off to water storage tanks on ground level. Tanks store between 10,000 and 50,000 litres of water, which can be filtered for drinking or used in the garden and home. Sabrina’s idea won the Philips Livable Cities Award 2010/2011.
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Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy
Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, California-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“There was a lot of...
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Random Acts of Kindness
It’s Random Acts of Kindness Week. Go do something nice!
“He loves the fact that he is who he is,” Roger Montgomery, Lin’s...”
– Oh the Linsanity (From The Huffington Post)
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This Is Generation Flux
What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates—and even enjoys—recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it. This is no simple task. The vast bulk of our institutions—educational, corporate, political—are not built...
Two Super Bowl Moments Land in Twitter's Record... →
Twitter reaction reached 12,233 tweets per second at the end of the Giants vs. Patriots game and 10,245 TPS during Madonna’s halftime performance Sunday night. Both numbers put the moments at numbers two and three on the list, just behind the online buzz sparked by Japanese anime movie Castle in the Sky in December (25,088 TPS).
Greatest Innovator
The data comes from a survey asking 1,010 Americans ages 16 – 25 to identify the greatest innovator of all time. The majority of surveyed young Americans – 52% – chose Edison (over Jobs) as the greatest innovator.
45 percent said that invention is not given enough attention in their school
28 percent said their education left them unprepared to enter the fields that lead to innovation, namely...
“Freelance writer Michael Shinzaki said that if he could get in on the IPO, he’d...”
– (From LA Times)
JC Penney Transformation
January 2012
22 posts
Food Spending Calculator →
Mother Jones has used Bundle’s data to research food consumption/spending. You can learn how you stack up with their food spending calculator.
I was surprised to hear my beloved city of Austin in 2009 spent “almost twice the national average for dining out; five Detroit households could eat for a year on an average Austinite’s food budget.”
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Let's Swap
Swap-O-Matic is a New York City-based vending machine project encourages people to donate and receive used items for free.
Swap-o-matic - Promotional Video #1 from Lina Fenequito on Vimeo.
(From Good)
The State of the Union Gets Live-Tweeted →
Twitter said the most popular moment with tweeters overall was Obama’s corny joke about spilled milk, in a section about legislation reform. Whether people loved it or hated it, they tweeted about it, at a rate of 14,131 tweets per minute.
Overall, Twitter counted 766,681 tweets about the State of the Union.
(From All Things D)
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Advice (in posters)
Advice To Sink In Slowly asked design graduates to pass on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters. These posters are free to first-year UK students.
Advice is subjective. But, by passing on advice in a creative way, it is possible to create something that lasts, that people will want to live with and which can let the advice sink in slowly and help out...
One "Tablet" Per Child
One Laptop Per Child created a tablet with Marvell that will be priced around $100 to be sold in bulk to countries. It can be powered by a hand crank, solar panel, and even waterwheel or bicycle. It runs Android or its own Sugar OS.
(From Design Milk and Ars Technica)
How to be more interesting
To be interesting…
Go exploring
Share what you discover
Have a cause
Give it a shot
(Kristan said this Forbes post reminded her of me. That was nice of her.)
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Food Flags
What a fun campaign for the Sydney International Food Festival, done by ad agency WHYBIN. Each country’s flag is represented by foods normally associated with the country. Brazil, Austrailia and Italy below.
(From: The Kitchn)
Love Letters for Veterans
Brannan Vines is founder of the nonprofit Family of a Vet. Her husband Caleb did two yearlong tours in Iraq, suffered a traumatic brain injury and struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, so at the ripe old age of 34 he’s dramatically different than the guy Brannan married. He sometimes has no control over being restless, or paranoid, or unbearably pissed off. In moments of...
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Like, Facebook, Like, Relationship, Like, You...
In Fathom Analytics’ new Relationship Quality Index, the top-rated brands on Facebook tend to be the ones with the most likes. YouTube (48 million likes), MTV (29 million), Coca-Cola (36 million), Starbucks (26 million) and Disney (29 million) make up the top five. But because of other factors, such as engagement and emotion, those brands don’t fall in precise order of fan...
6 Steps for Protecting Corporate Reputation in the... →
It takes years to build a good reputation, but seconds to damage it beyond repair, as executives at companies from Dell to Domino’s certainly have found out.
This was a sentiment echoed by executives at the Senior Corporate Communication Management Conference in New York when discussing social media and corporate reputation and how to embrace the new reality of immediate communications.
...
New Yorkers live longer
I suppose this is good news to start the new year back at work.
The latest data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics shows New York City has the highest life expectancy in the country. Babies born in 2009 can expect to live a record 80.6 years. That’s almost three years longer than a decade ago, and more than two years longer than the current national average of 78.2 years.
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Dream big. Act bigger.
Since moving to New York, for some odd reason I like to put a pithy statement for my new year’s resolution on my phone (as a daily reminder for the entire year). The first year it was “Don’t forget about you,” and last year it was “Help others.” This year I thought it only fitting to be “Dream big. Act bigger.”
Happy New Year!
December 2011
21 posts
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Life of crime by Geographer
Geographer released the song this week! You can listen below and also sign-up to download Life of crime (from Paste Magazine)
Cowbird: "Humanity's sagas"
Jonathan Harris, as you know is someone I’m a fan of, launched Cowbird this month, which is a visual online diary where you can tie a photo you take with narrative. I think it would actually suit me well (I used to write vignettes daily), but I doubt people in my life would take the time to read this with the rest of my digital footprint of blogs/social networks.
Stories in Cowbird are...
Innovation: Countries and Industries
(From Good Magazine)
Microsoft Mixes Social Networking With Search
So.cl from Microsoft review by MIT’s Technology Review:
It’s a well-made reinvention of the basic design shared by the major social networks, centered on Microsoft’s Bing Web search engine. Most posts on the site start as queries typed into the search box at the top of the page. The top few results can be shared with friends, and images turned up through a Bing search...
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Some Unbelievable Social Media Stats →
Due to the rapidly evolving nature of social media, the stats need updating all the time and the latest iteration reveals some fascinating insights.
There are 2.3 billion Google +1s clicked a day
Half a million new Android users register their account each day
Amazingly, despite the staggering billion tweets sent out every week, YouTube videos receive view counts twenty times that
...