80 Photographies de Tokyo en HDR
A really beautiful collection of HDR photographs of Tokyo, one of my favourite cities. The vibrancy and life of the city really struck me while I was there; completely different in tone and texture to a European city. The HDR technique really seems to capture some of that feeling with it’s saturated colours and surreal look.
If you don’t want to look through all eighty, I made a gallery of my favourites.
TOC 2010: Arianna Huffington, ‘Publishing Is Dead; Long Live Publishing!’
Self-expression is the new entertainment. So, you know, we used to never question the fact that people could be sitting on a couch for seven hours watching bad TV. Right, and nobody said, “why are they doing that without anybody paying them?”
Clay Shirky also speaks about how passive consumption need not be the primary means of entertainment in Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, one of my favourite of his talks.
Seen Not Heard—How obscure security makes school suck
Though watching students at home through the webcams of their school-provided laptops may be mercifully rare—I mean, what the hell were those teachers thinking?—running a school like a hotbed of violence does no favours to the kids there.
Written by a recent graduate of Virginia’s public school system, this article describes the draconian measures on offer at his old school, which he says made the children feel more paranoid, not more safe.
Harmony — Procedural drawing tool
A quirky, wonderful drawing program. This is just my playing with the brushes, but even so I find the interplay of form just magical.
It’s written using JavaScript and Canvas, so you’ll need a non-IE browser to play along.
Streams of Content, Limited Attention
From danah boyd, a thoughtful, engrossing piece about how the spread of the means to produce and publish could, perhaps counter-intuitively, make the world more insular and clique-ridden.
In an era of networked media, we need to recognize that networks are homophilous and operate accordingly. Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. Only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own. These people are and should be highly valued in society, but just because people can be what Ethan Zuckerman calls “xenophiles” doesn’t mean they will be.
One possible use for the research into auto-summarisation and related-content-finding tools could be to bring conflicting (balancing?) views into one’s information stream. For those who wish to.