02005-08-26 | Uncategorized
Velo’v: Lyon’s Rentabike
During the past 3 months the French city of Lyon has been experimenting with a bicycle rental program. And I guess you could say it’s been a rideaway success. The 1,500 silver and red bikes have 15,000 urbanites signed up, ready to use them. On average, each bike is released from it’s computerised stand 6.5 times a day. With a prepaid card you can extract a bike from one of these ‘smart’ racks knowing that it’s ready to roll – the rack will only yield a bike if its brakes, tyre pressure, gears and lights have already been digitally checked and approved, and you’ve swiped your prepaid card for access. The cost of the card? A paltry 5 Euro per year ($6 USD), and if your ride is less than half an hour it’s free! If all the bicycles are taken from the set of racks, nearest your set-off point, you can ask it where the nearest available bikes are located. Commonsense and technology finally merge – I’m delightfully astounded. And in the next two years they expect to have rolled out a total of 4,000 bicycles. Amazing. Read Jon Henley’s Guardian article here, where he says even the Dutch are impressed, or allez directement à Velo’v
(Via Treehugger)
02005-08-25 | Uncategorized
Let’s rank the artiste plasticien contemporain!
I’m fascinated by the artist ranking system on the ArtFacts website. Art, like pop music, is pretty hard to quantify; you like what you like. Nevertheless, like any human activity in the real world, art does leave behind it a data trail, a ‘spime slime’ (as Bruce Sterling might say). And the trail is quantifiable, rankable, chartable.
The ArtFacts data trail is concerned with attention, fame and exhibitions. Artfacts have devised an algorithm which ranks the 21,158 visual artists in their database according to where they’re showing their work and how often they show. The ranking does not reflect financial value of the artist’s work.
‘Attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism,’explains the ArtFacts site, citing Georg Franck’s concept of ‘the economy of attention’. ‘The artist ranking… orders artists by the professional attention invested in them. It provides the wider audience with a feeling for where a particular artist stands in the eyes of the professionals.’ The result? A series of nifty little graphs showing whether any given artist’s reputation is soaring or crashing over time, plus a Top 100 ‘chart rundown’ of the hottest artists, living and dead.
(Via Click opera)
And Picasso is back at number one – see title link.
02005-08-25 | Uncategorized
From David Burn’s blog:
The band was in the midst of a tour, the one that was eventually filmed as Stop Making Sense. As we crisscrossed the continent (due to technical miscalculations this tour never really went to Europe) I could see that audiences were reacting more and more vociferously and positively to this relatively new song. How exciting! But as I began to hear rumors about the promo money being spent to help the song on radio all sorts of thoughts ran through my head.
I wondered if every pop song that had moved me on the radio, from when I was in my teens, had been paid for. Oh jeez! Therefore, other than a few free-form stations around at that time I was being treated like a Pavlovian dog – what I had believed were my subjective passions and discoveries were actually the result of a concerted program to pound certain tunes into my innocent brain. I had been totally manipulated! What I thought were decisions and loves that were mine and mine alone had been planted in my head by sleazy characters I could barely imagine. Free will? Hah! My entire past was called into question. Who am I? Am I not partly what I like? And if those things I like were not completely of my own choosing, then what am I?
Fascinating! To continue reading click on title link and scroll down to the July 30 entry.
02005-08-25 | Uncategorized
Mobile Phones Vs. Smoking
From Japan Today:
The number of junior high and high school students who own cell phones is increasing, and there is a high chance that phone bills are weighing on the money they spend on cigarettes.
– Kenji Hayashi, head of the research team of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry and an assistant director at the National Institute of Public Health, on the drop in the number of teenage smokers.
(Via Jean Snow)
02005-08-25 | Uncategorized
As much as Sony and Toshiba have been trying to avoid it, it’s becoming more and more likely that another format war similar to the VHS vs. Betamax days will be facing consumers over the next couple years. According to the Yomiuri newspaper, the two camps have abandoned talks.
With multiple next-gen DVD formats looming, why not avoid those altogether and use harddrives instead? I personally don’t even trust DVDs for backup and still use AIT tape-backup in my studio.
