The UK is taking its network of 4.2 million CCTV cameras a step further: disembodied recorded voices haranguing errant citizens via loudspeaker. It sounds awful, I know, but every time I visit my home town (one of the 20 towns where the system will be installed) I’m horrified at the behaviour and disregard for public… Read More »
Everyone is twittering about Twitter, but I kind of liked this defintion from Leisa Rechelt; “Ambient intimacy”. I like the term, and the piece is definitely worth a read. clipped from www.disambiguity.com Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually… Read More »
Another intriguing use of Google Earth: to map statistical likelihood of car crashes, from Ohio State University. Interesting stuff, though it doesn’t explore what I think is the key factor in crashes: unpredictability. In a place like the UK everyone follows strict rules (supposedly), so any deviation is unpredictable and therefore likely to cause an… Read More »
Great piece in the NYT/IHT on the company behind Sudoku and similar games. Their approach — no trademarking, harnessing users to help develop and perfect games — all sounds very Open Source: clipped from www.iht.com Nikoli’s secret, Kaji said, lay in a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create… Read More »
Well chosen words from The State of the News Media via Richard Sambrook’s Sam Brook’s (apologies, Richard) sacredfacts. We journalists, in short, don’t recognise that we’re no longer the bee’s knees: clipped from sambrook.typepad.com Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows.… Read More »