August 2010 Archives

"When I came to Google, they really hadn't fully understood the ramifications of moving into a rural community," he said. "If you build a data center in downtown Atlanta or New York City, nobody cares."

The company is planning to deploy major power-saving technologies in the new data center, including new UPS technology, an evaporative cooling system, and airside economizers, to name a few. The UPS system has a patent pending and is a block redundant N+1 topology. It promises a reduction of up to 12% in power usage. Facebook is also planning to recycle the heat generated by servers and to use that heat to warm office space when required. The airside economizer will bring in cold air from outside for more than 60% of the year. Traditional chiller systems have been replaced by an evaporative cooling system, which minimizes water usage.Read more about square by Rakesh Dogra

Which brings us back to manifest destinies, physical and digital. As Patricia Limerick has argued in her reconsideration of frontier ideology, the moonstruck rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, though it may have been sincere, neatly papered over a host of less enlightened agendas. The surge west was a critical driver of economic growth, allowing the growing republic to harness vast amounts of natural resources and create new markets. The high-flown ideology of Manifest Destiny was, in short, a cover for a massive land grab (not to mention the slaughter of the Indians). The same is happening online. Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.

With dynamic-feed proximity-based geofencing and geofencing APIs, it's possible to deliver these dynamic data sources just-in-time as mobile users move within geographic proximity of continuously shifting, moving-target data streams.

Geospatial calculations can be complex, as is rapid computation of massive amounts of location data.

Så det får bli ambitionen för nästa decennium - att hitta hybridformerna, där bloggens (eller kanske twittrandets) händelsepuls kombineras med bokens förmåga att foga samman till begripliga berättelser.

So what we're trying to say is that maybe in the globalised world, vernacular doesn't mean local materials so much. It's more about the organising of your buildings and cities in such a way that they provide all the qualities, like natural ventilation and temperature, as a product of the architecture rather than machines

1. Check in where the user actually is
2. Don't encourage checking in where the user isn't
3. Never check in without permission from the user
4. Encourage social behavior, discourage bot-like behavior
5. Rapid, repeated checkins are not tolerated
6. Use the API responsibly

Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you're likely gay yourself.

It almost makes me question the value of bothering to report what I'm standing near at all. It really does.

I'm sorry. I didn't really mean that; that would be anti-social. And, I know that.

But, whether receiving kudos via event-based scripts and slightly-altered phone graphics or otherwise, I owe it to the people I've never met who sometimes stand near places where I've stood near to know that I have also stood near there sometimes too. Sometimes more or less often, and on serendipitous occasions, the same number of times that they stood near there. But, yes: I did sometimes stand near where they stood near. And, yes, they and computers should know that.

The best the search giant can do is acknowledge and embrace the fact that it's now the newest, most junior member of an ancient and august guild of humanists, and let its new colleagues participate in the process of fixing and maintaining its metadata archive. After all, why should Google's engineers be attempting to do art history? Why not just focus on giving new tools to actual historians, and let them do their thing? The results of a more open, inclusive metadata curation process might never reveal how many books their really are in the world, but they would do a vastly better job of enabling scholars to work with the library that Google is building

Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There's a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.

Idén till sin forskning fick han under långa händelselösa nätter när han jobbade som spärrvakt vid Mälarhöjdens tunnelbane station i södra Stockholm i början av 2000-talet. Med blott ett 20-tal biljetter att stämpla varje natt hade han gott om tid att läsa sina sociologikurser.

- SL är en jättefin institution. Jag råder alla studenter att hitta ett sådant jobb.

Under sin tid som forskare har Roland Paulsen intervjuat en rad personer med luft i sin arbetsdag. Till de mer undersysselsatta hörde en banktjänsteman som jobbade heltid men bara ägnade en kvart om dagen åt sitt jobb.

This Fall, students will suspend disbelief and enter into the world of science fiction: a space of imaginary yet scientifically-grounded elements. Students will explore ideas on alternate possibilities in a world based on known or postulated laws of nature. The studios will delve into topics such as space mining, parallel universes, alternate worlds, and nanotechnology. Future realities will be uncovered, re-created, designed and prototyped.