Threads
Adam Holland mentioned today that it’s getting harder to write predictive science fiction because time between invention and adoption has decreased massively in the last 100 years.
Dan Levy’s copy of the WSJ had an article on tracking migration patterns with cellphones. How many people = one phone?
Whack-a-mole: a viable methodology for dealing with serious problems.
Like many power companies in the area, Consolidated Edison played whack-a-mole to keep up with power failures, though it said it had plenty of slack capacity. (nyt)
Backyard Post is a city directory edited by… editors that are paid moneys. Not as automated as EveryBlock, not as text-heavy as ArborWiki. William Hartnett’s “glorified spreadsheet“.
Alternative newspapers are being read by suburbia sez some (probably methodologically unsound) report.
Rob Curley responds to a WSJ article on his “‘Hyperlocal’ flop” — that geeks can and do know neighborhoods.
A different response: the failure is in the business model, not in real journalism. On the folly of local-local.
Andrea Calderaro of Caltech is using European and other demographic information to map the digital divide worldwide, the first such project. Follow up is asking how this will affect bottom-up political participation. All work is quantitative, based off survey questions he didn’t write; he’s not actually asking people how they use technologies or investigating how they don’t. I wonder how much of the Real will be reflected in his report; excited to read it, in any case.
Big Pictures from Boston.com
My flight to BOS leaves DTW (map) at 9:45a on Thursday the 29th. I’ll probably be in the city through the last week of August. I’ll be working with the Media Re:Public project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Goals of the project:
- a typology of participatory media forms, from new entities large and small to the expanding range of projects within traditional news media entities;
- case studies of representative projects, to explore the utility of the framework;
- an “issues map” of cross-cutting questions aimed at informing future research ; and
- an initial assessment of methods to measure and visualize the impact(s) of participatory media.
Through the summer, I will still be working from a distance on small projects at the RC and around Ann Arbor.
My contact info: always 1 734 846 5010 or hampelm@umich.edu
ArborWiki has been upgraded to a more recent version of MediaWiki. Apart from the usual MediaWiki system changes, we’ve now got a Captcha (recaptcha, http://recaptcha.net) that’s triggered when (a) anonymous users post more than a certain number of external links or (b) on new user creation.
dev.arborwiki.org is now the place for new things — it seems that the good old days when I would want to experiment on the live site are over.
Please let me know if you’re interested in contributing to the development of ArborWiki, or have any issues with the meta recent changes.
[updated 15/9 to clarify; dev server was a good choice, not an AADL policy]
I’ve been trying to find a better way to build a BIG LIST OF PEOPLE (for me, that means faculty pages) There just doesn’t seem to be a nice way to do it. Here’s a list of the examples I’ve looked at recently; if you have one, please send it to me.
I ended up just adding a making improvements to the old RC faculty page: each entry is now a vcard, and you can skip around by last name. I also added a last-name navigation bar that followed discreetly down the page, but someone deleted it.
WEMU host Michael G. Nastos retired from station this evening after nearly 30 years. An explanation will appear in Saturday’s Ann Arbor News, he says. No further explanation was printed, so either the News left out information or I misheard.
I grew up with Michael G. Nastos and WEMU Jazz, nearly every day since I was conscious. It makes his departure particularly saddening for me. If anyone knows more, I’d be interested to hear.
