As part of a feature on the iPad going back to school this Fall, The Baltimore Sun interviewed me about our ongoing iPad pilot program. The reporter was particularly interested in our focus on faculty and staff as many other schools seem to be taking a different approach by giving them to students foremost. Nice to see some recognition on the front page for sure!
(Via Case for the iPad)
Certainly some big ideas to consider that will provide much to mull over at stop signs and grocery store lines over the next few weeks. I’d also like to know more about the RSA, so I feel some internet research coming on this weekend.
Now this is customer service the way it was meant to be:
Dear Nicholas,
We’re so sorry but due to an inventory error we were unable to fulfill your order for a Diesel Footwear Leather Color Block Low Top Sneakers. Please note we have not charged your credit card for this item.
We apologize for this inconvenience and aim to serve you better next time you shop. We will credit your account with an additional $25.00 to use towards your next purchase on our site.
Please feel free to contact our customer care team at support@gilt.com.
Thank you,
Gilt Groupe
No, thank you, Gilt. I will absolutely be coming back to use that $25 because no one could ever accuse you of being a hassle to deal with.
Did you know there is a punctuation that represents verbal irony? It looks like a tilde (~) over a period and it’s called the snark. I want to find a font that includes this keycap because I would use it more than any other person, I am sure. There’s even a website devoted to it: thesnark.org
(Thanks to ElectricLit for tweeting about this earth-changing bit of typography last night.)
Wikileaks has posted a file that is known only as “insurance.” According to Wired, the 1.4 GB torrent file is ten times larger than everything else available combined – with relative heavy encryption. What is it? I have waited all day and no one has gotten through to the truth yet. Intrigue a la The X-Files!
Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring (Wired)
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
Web Bot (Wikipedia)
High and Ure claim that the Web Bot works by using a form of the Wisdom of Crowds, with spiders that search the internet for about 300,000 keywords with emotional context[3] and record the preceding and following words to create a “snapshot.” The technology is claimed to be able to examine the collective unconscious and be able to predict catastrophic events 60 to 90 days in advance.
I sure can’t.
The Fits.me mannequin may be the most cleverly futuristic piece of hardware I have ever seen. It is a torso equipped with motorized panels that can approximate a wide range of male body shapes. Clothing retailers can use this to create a database of photos of their garments and when a customer enters in their measurements, the correct photos is culled up. It works like this:
See? Genius. Never wonder what size is going to look best on you again! As someone who is often let down by unnecessarily boxy menswear, this could save my ass while internet shopping.
A few days ago, I posted briefly on a New York Times article talking about the remapping of our brains that occurs when we multitask heavily or even just use computers in general. Echoing this article’s view that more media = less focus is a piece by Nicholas Carr from the June issue of Wired (which I was reading on paper, thank you very much) which discusses the distracting nature of hypertext hyperactive content.
A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.
The takeaway seems to be that we are causing our brains to remake themselves in order to deal with a wide breadth of stuff – that never goes very deep. Bad, computers! Shame on you, technology! Or maybe not. Because in the exact same issue, Wired, asked two researchers of personal motivation, Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, to discuss what is being termed (by Shirky) “the cognitive surplus.” Their argument goes a little something like this: with more options for putting our time to use than ever before, free time pursuits will become more varied, taking forms never seen before. Though not precisely related to the idea of focus, this statement did get me thinking:
When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one.
Whoa! And it’s true – I often find myself cursing the lack of hours in the day to get caught up on my favorite TV shows when I fill my evenings with blogging, online reading or freelance design. If it weren’t for these infernal computers stuffing my free time with their distractions, I could take part in the much more honorable 200 billion hours of television that I should be watching with my fellow Americans this year!
(As originally posted on my Instructional Technology work blog.)
Want to learn about the hot Newton MessagePad that Apple just released? Or order a pack of System 7 installation floppies (High Density!) for your LC II+? Well, friend, Cult of Mac has created an Apple website circa 1993 just for you.
And if you are feeling even more archaic, be sure to check out their 1983 mockup as well. Project Macintosh sure does look promising…
Gizmodo has tipped me off to the upcoming 48 Hour Magazine project. To say that this looks like perhaps the best idea I’ve seen in a long time would be a gross (in all senses of the word) understatement. Basically, a bunch of passionate magazine and publishing people are getting together for a weekend and hammering out a creative, insightful, current collection of submissions from writers, photographers, etc around the world. No bullshit, no un-fun pieces – just a magazine for the sake of making one.
Like a beautiful summer day in the Pacific Northwest that you can carry around in your heart through the dreary-ass winter. Or maybe a hip flask is a better metaphor.
(Alex Madrigal on what this project is like for those in the business of magazines)
With all the talk of digital texts and magazines I’ve been rifling through as a result of the iPad’s launch, it’s refreshing to see a new take on producing a print product come together. As a lover of the magazine, especially in its most experimental forms, this will be exceptional. As one project founder, Mat Honan, basically pulls from my own childhood:
I grew up reading Rolling Stone, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Spy, and Spin. Magazines let me drop into a world without rednecks, and then hang out there for hours on end. While the Internet has largely taken over that cultural delivery vehicle role, I still find the experience of immersion you get from a paper magazine unequaled.
You can get involved, watch it live via UStream and, theoretically, buy the finished product when it’s all done. I know I’m excited for this to kick off in two days!