February 11, 2011 – 9:20 am
“In other regions, integrating young adults into the work force—coupled with a declining birth rate and shrinking youth bulge—has provided an opening for democratization. Social scientists have found that, as an increasing proportion of the population had a stake in the system, formerly authoritarian states like South Korea and Taiwan felt they could experiment with political liberalization. [...]
January 29, 2011 – 3:41 pm
Time: 2020. Place: Mount Pleasant. The business streets look mostly the same, but there’s a different atmosphere, literally, because the air is cleaner. The broad sidewalks accommodate tables spilling out from restaurants in the summer. A street car runs down Main. Bicyclists still prefer bikeways over the main roads, but there are more of them [...]
January 24, 2011 – 1:19 pm
via opinion.berkeley.edu “Opinion Space is a new social media technology designed to help communities exchange ideas and suggestions about the issues and policies they care about. Opinion Space is based on a game model that incorporates techniques from deliberative polling, collaborative filtering, and multidimensional visualization. It introduces an intuitive graphical “map” that displays patterns, trends, [...]
January 14, 2011 – 1:15 pm
Big cities have a statistical advantage because the agglomeration of people, more intense social interactions, and better developed infrastructures invoke efficiencies and speed up the pace at which things happen. This is a worldwide, historic fact and does not much depend on what is particular or special in a given city, he says. The researchers [...]
December 19, 2010 – 11:16 pm
A Call for the Discovery of ALL Life Forms on Earth If we discovered life on another planet, the first thing we would do is conduct a systematic inventory of that planet’s life. This is something we have never done on our home planet. The aim of the All Species Inventory is simple: within the [...]
December 19, 2010 – 7:51 pm
These are good times indeed for Chongqing, home to 32 million people and growing so quickly its maps are already out of date by the time they are printed. The bursting municipality — a dense urban core ringed by rapidly changing rural districts that together are about the size of Austria and now have more [...]
December 15, 2010 – 3:34 pm
via wiki.ubc.ca Video from a book talk Stewart Brand did at UBC in October for his recent book Whole Earth Discipline. Wish I could have made this event…I used to work with Stewart in San Francisco at Global Business Network. However, I was otherwise occupied that day at BC Womens hospital with a newborn baby [...]
December 12, 2010 – 5:57 pm
Image: Ray Bartkus Imagine the Arctic in 2050 as a frigid version of Nevada—an empty landscape dotted with gleaming boom towns. Gas pipelines fan across the tundra, fueling fast-growing cities to the south like Calgary and Moscow, the coveted destinations for millions of global immigrants. It’s a busy web for global commerce, as the world’s [...]
December 9, 2010 – 10:00 am
via superflux.in Presentation on urban design and how Indian “wallahs” of all kinds are actually analog information delivery systems, from London/Ahmedabad design firm Superflux. Bonus points for mentioning my former colleague Nils Gilman alongside robot fortune tellers and “zero tension paan.”
December 9, 2010 – 1:10 am
To launch the Domino Project, a bestselling author is walking away from traditional book publishing and using the tools of new media to bring his (and his colleagues’) ideas to the world in a new way. Amazon is working with me to create The Domino Project, a new kind of book publishing venture, one that [...]
