Claus.dahl

Kelli Anderson is at it again. Her pop-up book, This Book is a Planetarium, is due out this spring, but in the meantime, she's made a book that turns into an actual camera. And you can buy it or make your own. Here's how the camera works:

My copy arrived in the mail the other day and I can't wait to try it out.

In the midst of this piece by Matt Taibbi on Republican presidential candidates blaming media bias for their outright falsehoods are two paragraphs which perfectly sum up the state of contemporary news media:

It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.

The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.

If Americans are getting intellectually fat and lazy binging on junk news, perhaps the solution is something akin to "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants," Michael Pollan's advice for healthy eating: Follow the news, not too much, mostly facts.

Update: I was reminded that Clay Johnson wrote an entire book called The Information Diet (at Amazon).

The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear. Just as we have grown morbidly obese on sugar, fat, and flour-so, too, have we become gluttons for texts, instant messages, emails, RSS feeds, downloads, videos, status updates, and tweets.

We're all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness. The Information Diet shows you how to thrive in this information glut-what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential for everyone who strives to be smart, productive, and sane.

Johnson spoke at Webstock the same year I did...here's a video of his talk about Industrialized Ignorance. (via @philipashlock)

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Folks at the moovel lab were curious about how true this statement is, so they tested it out. They laid a grid on top of Europe, and then algorithmically found a route from each cell in the grid to Rome, resulting in about half a million routes total. Yep, there seems to be a way from Rome from every point.

Above is the map of these routes. Road segments used more frequently were drawn thicker, and as you might expect you get what looks like a root system through the continent. I'm guessing thicker lines are highways and freeways.

Moovel did the same with cities named Rome in the United States and the state capitals. Pretty sweet.

Tags: Rome, moovel

1. Distributed Reactive Programming (A Paper a Day) -- this week's focus on reactive programming has been eye-opening for me. I find the implementation details less interesting than the simple notion that we can define different consistency models for reactive programs and reason about them.
2. Attacking HTTP/2 Implementations -- Our talk focused on threats, attack vectors, and vulnerabilities found during the course of our research. Two Firefox, two Apache Traffic Server (ATS), and four Node-http2 vulnerabilities will be discussed alongside the release of the first public HTTP/2 fuzzer. We showed how these bugs were found, their root cause, why they occur, and how to trigger them.
3. What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems -- a great intro/explainer to the different concepts in distributed systems.
4. The Autonomous Winter is Coming -- The future of any given manufacturer will be determined by how successfully they manage their brands in a market split between Mobility customers and Driving customers.

Apparently they set off fireworks everywhere in Lima, Peru when the New Year hits. And Jeff Cremer was there with his drone to capture the craziness. Wow. (via colossal)

Well this is sure to get way less press than Uber’s announcement than it had served its billionth ride since inception.

Chinese rival-- and, let’s be honest, the only real rival Uber has-- Didi Kuaidi announced in a “Dear Media Friends” email yesterday that it had surpassed 1.43 billion rides.

In a single year.

And 200 million of those came in December alone. Simple math shows accelerating growth and a run rate-- even if that growth slows to zero-- of some 2.4 billion rides next year.

That’s right: This claim would mean Didi is the largest ride sharing company in the world, by a large margin. It pulled off in two thirds of a year what it took Uber’s whole lifespan-- and some $8.2 billion including equity and debt-- to achieve.

I say “claim” because I’ve come to a point where I don’t believe anything any ridesharing company says about its ride volume or market share...

A British vlogger was excited to try out his brand new hoverboard when he got a nasty surprise this week. And naturally it was all caught on tape.

Read more...

This is a bunch of animated naked people falling into two precise columns. Mesmerizing. Perhaps a little NSFW? And throw some headphones on...the sound, while subtle, is essential.

See also that video -- you remember the one -- of a bunch of computer-generated people being mowed down by a rotating bar.

Never say anything in an electronic message that you wouldn’t want appearing, and attributed to you, in tomorrow’s front-page headline in the New York Times. That was the advice of Colonel David Russell, head of the IPTO at DARPA in the mid-1970s and it still holds true today.

Read more...

Set for launch in February 2016, we are proud to present the fifth book of the Playful Thinking Series. Katherine Isbister’s How games Move Us: Emotion by Design is an examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players, with examples from popular, indie, and art games.

This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience.

Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train.

Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.

For nylig holdt jeg en præsentation hos Kommunikationsforum af min tilgang til arbejdet med digital strategi.

Præsentationen kan også fungere som en appetitvækker, hvis du overvejer at læse min manual til digital strategi.

The post Lav en digital strategi, der giver resultater appeared first on Morten Gade.

I have no idea what's going on here, and I prefer to keep it that way.

Tags: government, humor