-
“It comes down to this: what’s the rationale for hosting this event? The reasons have got to be more than just making a few quick tourism dollars or showing your city off to the world. If a city needs this kind of development, if it’s in sync with the city’s natural growth, then the Olympics can be a good thing. But so often cities haven’t taken into account the long-term benefit of their citizens when they’re putting together their Olympic bid.” -Gary Hustwit
The Olympic City is an ongoing photography project by Gary Hustwit and Jon Pack. They’re traveling the world, documenting the sites built for previous Olympic games. A book of their findings comes out later this month. We caught up with them to discuss what they’ve discovered so far.
Read: After the Olympics, Documenting What’s Left
[Images: The Olympic City]
(via pacificstand)
-
Fast Wi-Fi on Flights May Serve the Airlines, Too - NYTimes.com
The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by the opportunities that high-speed broadband service presents for airlines themselves to essentially sell more things to the customers, whether the product is in-flight entertainment, food and drink, customized services to elite-status passengers or products at the destination, including hotel packages, sports and concert tickets, restaurant and theater reservations. On an airplane, you have a captive market, and with sophisticated technology, you can sell to passengers in very personal ways.
And, of course, flight attendants will be expected to become even more adept at using in-flight technology. The question is whether they will embrace the moment.
“We found consistently in our research, whether the markets were the U.S., Europe or Asia, that flight attendants are typically the least automated group within the airline work force,” said Andrew Kemmetmueller, the chief executive of Allegiant Systems, a technology development company that focuses on airline operations.
-
Paul Irish on Chrome Moving to Blink ∙ An A List Apart Blog Post
What the Chrome team is up to. Worth a quick read and skimming of the linked docs if you haven’t had time to follow along lately.
-
Soapbox Envy: CSS is not an amoral monster.
Quit thinking of pages as static, box-like things.
Hell, if you can, stop thinking in terms of pages, and instead think in terms of content. Unlike a memo or a broadcast, web media allow you to present things in whatever context you damned well please. If you want to split one page into twenty as circumstances might dictate, you can make something that does that.
Via
Starting the morning off right with Ben Henick’s punchy “CSS is not an amoral monster.” undercaffeinated.tumblr.com/post/498785314…
— Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb)At some point I posted this to the wrong account. Reblogging well after the fact.
(via tiffehr)
-
Publisher Threatens to Sue Blogger for $1-Billion
Jeffrey Beall is a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, but he’s known online for his popular blog Scholarly Open Access, where he maintains a running list of open-access journals and publishers he deems questionable or predatory.
Now, one of those publishers intends to sue Mr. Beall, and says it is seeking $1-billion in damages.
The publisher, the OMICS Publishing Group, based in India, is also warning that Mr. Beall could be imprisoned for up to three years under India’s Information Technology Act, according to a letter from the group’s lawyer. Mr. Beall received the letter on Tuesday from IP Markets, an Indian firm that manages intellectual-property rights.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Some of my favorite lawbloggers are already posting critiques of the legality of the letter. And thankfully Mr. Beall agrees the suit, if brought, would have no merit.
-
-
Spongebob Learns a Lesson in Journalism Ethics
Well this might be the best episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever. You can watch the whole thing here.
If you don’t, here’s the spoiler version:
Mr. Krabs starts his own newspaper, The Krabby Kronicle, and makes Spongebob a reporter. But Mr. Krabs wants some embellishment in the stories. He says:
SpongeBob, what’s the meaning of this? ‘LOCAL RESIDENT WATCHES POLE’? No one’s going to pay to read this malarky. When you write these stories, you’ve got to use a little imagination, boy. Maybe instead of “Man Watches Pole,” you could say something like, “Man Marries Pole.” Then you could alter the photo a little to fit the headline…
After which Spongebob’s readers get angry at his yellow journalism and he ends up teaching his publisher a lesson.
Image: Screenshot from the episode.
H/T: Romenesko for the find.
-
Exploiting a Bug in Google's Glass - Jay Freeman (saurik)
Long but fascinating post (skimmable unless you like Android device debugging and development) where Mr. Freeman got all-but-root access to his Google Glass and poked around.
He kindly highlights the most interesting parts for laypeople, so scroll to the bottom and look for his conclusions after the yellow box. Key subheads: “What can someone do via my Glass?” and “What should Google do about this?”.
I’d quote a bit here but doing so would probably come across as an alarmist reaction. In fact it’s more a case of (very) early adopters doing what they love to do—try stuff and provide their thoughts.
(Via Torkington/Radar, which I really do try to avoid reblogging every week lest you all get irritated but his four links are almost always interesting.)
-
The World’s Most Powerful Computer Network Is Being Wasted on Bitcoin
It’s kind of like rounding up the world’s greatest minds and making them do Sudokus for nickels.
-
Moving beyond window.onload() | High Performance Web Sites/Steve Souders
window.onload is so Web 1.0
What we’re after is a metric that captures the user’s perception of when the page is ready. Unfortunately,
perception.ready()isn’t on any browser’s roadmap. So we need to find a metric that is a good proxy.Ten years ago,
window.onloadwas a good proxy for the user’s perception of when the page was ready. Back then, pages were mostly HTML and images. JavaScript, CSS, DHTML, and Ajax were less common, as were the delays and blocked rendering they introduce. It wasn’t perfect, butwindow.onloadwas close enough.Steve originally posted this in 2012’s Performance Calendar, which I’m remiss on finishing up. Glad he reposted this—it’s a great thing to keep in mind.
-
Subreddit connections, via colleague:
This jellyfish-looking thing is a social network-analysis of all of Reddit’s subreddits redditstuff.github.io/sna/
— Michael Roston (@michaelroston) May 14, 2013The third image is from colleague Erik Hinton. -
My Medical Choice - NYTimes.com
Angelina Jolie on her preventative double mastectomy:
Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.
I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be will able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.
(Ah, wrong account. Apologies. But I’m gonna leave this one here—it’s remarkable in many ways.)
-
U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone Records
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
-
I think if you’re going to really think about how to use the internet in an interesting way, like for conversations and stuff, Tumblr is a lot better. Even if you only have like two followers, because of the tags, it allows everybody to engage in a conversation.
John Green wants you to tag your posts. (via rachelfershleiser)
How well are you using tags?
(via books)
Tags. Tags. Tags. Tag your posts, folks!
(via libraryjournal)
Back when I started this collection, tags didn’t really exist. They certainly weren’t much of a navigation option. So I rarely added them and they never played much a role in my own Tumblr usage (except as punchlines). However, Tumblr’s growth and (one of my heroes) Mr. John Green both make clear points in favor of tagging.
I’ll…try harder.
(via unionmetrics)
-
Two strategies: The Washington Post vs. The NYT | Monday Note
Both are great American newspapers, both suffer from the advertising slump and from the transition to digital. But the New York Times’ paywall strategy is making a huge difference.
