World

World news, multicultural coverage, diversity in media. Washington College Media Channel 2

[mediachannel2]

Dual Purpose Racks

Have a rack of IBM servers that you feel could be doing a greater service to the world than hosting your network resources?  Well, your ship is just about to come in!  IBM will soon be looking for partners to experiment with mining accelerometer data from server hard drives to pinpoint and predict earthquakes.  

Makes you feel lazy just thinking about how ingenious IBM's engineers are, huh?

(Wired)

[mediachannel2]

Mobile Multitude

An important point made by The Economist online:  the rise of mobile telephony in developing countries is about to give way to an even more transformative rise in mobile internet access. 

What does this mean?  In places like India, Brazil, China, etc, a population that has never had access to the web is about to burst on to the scene using cheap, readily available mobile devices, unleashing 1 billion+ new users.  This will fully eclipse traditional users in the developed world ushering in a whole new age of the internet.

Questions remain about what language the web will move to, already a topic of discussion with China coming online in general.  More importantly, how will low literacy rates change the way the web works?  Touch devices and smart interfaces are certainly here to stay.

[mediachannel2]

Know The Students

The New York Times has published a rather lengthy article on the concept of a new developmental stage known as "emerging adulthood." The hallmarks of this proposed addition to birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood is a constant sense of limitless potential, a meandering attitude towards committing to a particular path towards that potential and a disinterest in setting to work on the "normal" milestones of becoming an adult in our society. Sound familiar?  Take a look at your classmates/students.

"If emerging adulthood is so important, why is it even possible to skip it?"

Now, not all twenty-somethings have been placed into the same boat.  Not everyone has helicopter parents or access to parental financial backing - or abuses it, if they do.  Not everyone is completely adrift upon graduation.  But the reality is that there is a new way of becoming an adult taking shape even if it's not necessarily a hard and fast life-stage. So, when classes start again next week, be sure to take into account the fact that today's students are not all here as adults.  But some of them might just emerge that way by the time their ride through Washington College is through.

(From Instructional Technology)

[mediachannel2]

Connecting Experience to Place

"Stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone will tell them this is the place their parents had their first kiss, and here’s the picture they took afterward, and here’s what their friends had to say,” Cox said.

Nauseau-inducing anecdote aside, Facebook's new Places functionality is perhaps one of the most compelling examples of augmented reality to date.  What makes it so intriguing is the sheer number of users this particular exercise in adding a connected layer to every day life will impact.  With 500 million+ Facebook users participating, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to pepper locations with pictures, notes, comments and stories.  And because they are Facebook users, the implication is that friends, family and colleagues have created this added layer of information - meaning it's pretty likely to have value to each user.  

With places, what we have is the potential for a really great AR experience that will be flooded with rich content far faster than any other new digital venture has been.  

(Wired)

[mediachannel2]

Little Matchbox World

I guarantee you that if someone had given me the technology when I was a child, I would have made something very similar to this with my enormous Hot Wheels/Matchbox collection (except it may have also involved a car wash.)

Tumblingerstraße from yo man on Vimeo.

(Via Jalopnik)

[mediachannel2]

Another Take on Rephotography

Gizmodo refers to them as time portals, but they are actually the rephotographic work of Russian artist Sergey Larenkov.  Mixing modern day street scenes with their World War II counterparts creates a spooky history lesson by showing the ghosts of a city's past.  A very powerful example of this art form.  

[mediachannel2]

Rephotography Gets Automated

Do you know what rephotography is?  I didn't, either but the concept is fantastic and I'm glad there is a term just for it.  Rephotography is the process of taking a photo in the exact same location as another photo, but at another time.  And now MIT has figured out a way to use computers to display old photos on top of new scenes.  So, imagine your digital camera or iPad offering you the option to see fifty years of street views pulled from their databases when querying a specific location.  The power of something like this for environmental scientists or historians is immense.

(Via Wired)

[mediachannel2]

Blogetry Goes Dark

Blogging service, Blogetry, has been completely taken offline - by the FBI.  Some 70,000 users were given no notice other than a failed connection as they attempted to log in to their blogs this week.  All of this seems to be stemming from a mandated shut down involving Blogetry's hosting provider, BurstNET.  After having been approached by the FBI with claims that Blogetry sites contained al-Quaida communications, BurstNET felt compelled to shut down the entire Blogetry network.

And thus is the way of the modern age - security will trump free exchange of information and a few "bad" apples will definitely spoil the bunch.

(From Wired's Threat Level)

[mediachannel2]

West Ashefield, Third Floor Tube Station

Wait - third floor tube station you say?  If a simulator counts as a real station then yes.  And this one certainly goes for broke.  Speakers pump the sounds of trains and other real audio while magazine stands and paper boxes are stocked.  Apparently it's used to train station employees but I think those tracks lead to another dimension.  Doctor Who can't be far off the mark, can it?

(io9)

[mediachannel2]

InfraRAD, Perhaps

Gorgeous photography of trees captured with an infrared camera.  I've truly never seen anything quite like it.

Or maybe I have.

(Via Treehugger)

[mediachannel2]

Twentysomething Children

"We have not developed and strengthened institutions to serve young adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said, “because we’re still living with the archaic idea that people enter adulthood in their late teens or early 20s."

From The New York Times, as shared with me by Nancy, on the topic of the lengthening road to adulthood.

I know I had a relatively a-typical transition from childhood into adulthood for my generation (Y or Millennial, depending on who you are asking.)  That being said, the only "institutions" my parents afforded me for being 18 was a dolly to get my stuff out of the house as quickly as possible and a strong sense of the fact that I'm on my own if I screw up.

Certainly not the $38,000 and 2 years of full-time labor the article quotes!

It's an interesting read, especially as we are faced with our position within this "Peter Pan" generation or are asked to lead it forward through education and administration.  

[mediachannel2]

How Well Do You Multitask?

A Facebook friend of mine has just recently posted an article from the New York Times entitled "Your Brain on Computers."  The story looks at the ways in which information saturation has begun to rewire the brains of heavy technology users.  It also discusses multitasking - specifically how effectiveness flags as more tasks are piled on top of one another.  There's even an online experiment that will give you a sense of how well you can focus through distraction and juggle multiple items.

Below are my results.  Does this make me a "supertasker?"

[mediachannel2]

Redesign BP's Logo

Sent to me from Nancy, this Flickr group started by Greenpeace UK is asking users to submit their redesigned BP logos.  From the description:

BP claim that they are 'beyond petroleum'. But this is a company that is up to it's neck in the dirtiest oil going.

Their nice green logo doesn't really seem to fit them too well, so we're running a competition to find a logo that we can use to rebrand BP.

Check out the other submissions (460 so far.)

[mediachannel2]

Ye Olde Jobs

A London lamplighter circa 1935

Graduation season is upon us, leaving hundreds of newly minted diplomas in the hands of adults across the country.  Adults who have absolutely no idea where to find a job nine times out of ten.  There are plenty of places on the web that will tell you what the hottest new opportunities for employment are, but only NPR has put together a gallery of jobs of a bygone era.  View photos, read descriptions and even listen to testimonial in "The Jobs of Yesteryear."

[mediachannel2]

How important is a clean screen?

Is it worth paralysis?  Nerve damage?  If you happen to own an iPhone, that shiny glass screen that greeted you in the box may have indirectly caused just that.  According to a new lawsuit filed in China against Wintek, a supplier for Apple and other tech companies, 44 workers have asked for compensation after being forced to clean glass screen with a known toxic chemical, n-hexane.  While the line manager who made the decision to use n-hexane has been fired, little has been done to help the workers who are now suffering the effects of such a truly stupid choice.  

The reasoning for all of this?  N-hexane dries faster and leaves fewer streaks than alcohol.

(Credit to AppleInsider)

[mediachannel2]

With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

President Obama in his commencement address to Hampton University

Does no one else find it marginally alarming that the president - who is by no means old, uneducated or unskilled - admits to not knowing how to operate some of the most influential devices in the world?  Norway's President uses an iPad and they aren't even on sale in there yet!

[mediachannel2]

The BP Oil Slick

One southern man has flown over the BP oil slick and reports back via YouTube what he saw:

It is hard to criticize an oil spill while flying in a fuel-powered plane, but this is certainly telling footage of the level of disaster BP and the people of the region are facing.  

The latest on the BP oil spill.

(Thanks, io9)