ideometric

Designed by Thermaltake and BMW, this computer case looks like the future (and costs $700).

This is the main reason I’ve never seen the point of joining twitter. There’s no content there that I’m interested in. That is, until the Iranian protests. But even then it was difficult to find what I was looking for.

…the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Source

Interesting NYT magazine article about datacenters and the infrastructure that runs the internet.

Tukwila is less a building than a machine for computing. “You look at a typical building,” Manos explained, “and the mechanical and electrical infrastructure is probably below 10 percent of the upfront costs. Whereas here it’s 82 percent of the costs.” Little thought is given to exterior appearances; even the word “architecture” in the context of a data center can be confusing: it could refer to the building, the network or the software running on the servers.

A couple months ago I lent $25 to a woman in Peru who wanted to buy more beans to sell at her local farmers’ market.

It’s not charity; she bought the beans for her business and has been slowly paying me back from the profit she makes on that investment – I’ve gotten $12.50 back so far. Lenders like me make no profit, but the organizations managing the loans charge interest to cover operating costs.

Kiva is the microlending site that makes this possible. Microlending is when you make small loans to people, often in developing countries where small amounts go a long way towards providing opportunities to escape poverty. These people are generally trying to start, maintain, or expand a business but lack the funds or availability of credit.

Kiva connects you to in-country organizations that screen applicants and disburse the money. This is different from charity because it provides the means to self-sufficiency and development. I think it also respects the dignity of people that are trying to make it in adverse conditions.

I think Kiva is still relatively young, but this kind of grass-roots, networked style of economic development has a lot of promise. It’s the sort of thing that Obama’s team picked up on with their fundraising tactics, drawing in millions of small donors to raise more than any previous campaign.

Photo: Taking a break from reading @ Yri Cafe in Hongdae

Started reading Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. It’s pretty comprehensive making the case for the importance of policy change and institutional shift in favor of openness and freedom for information technologies (away from incumbent industries’ and government support for proprietary models that stress ownership and access control). His key argument is that there is potential in the network communications paradigm for advancing justice, democracy, and freedom. How much of this potential will be realized depends on key decisions made now – regarding network neutrality, copyright and patent policy, the DMCA, DRM, etc. etc.

It’s dense though, I’ll write more when I have time to digest it. But so far so good – it makes a lot of points that I was trying to get at in my thesis, but only marginally succeeded in supporting.

Here’s a talk given by the author @ MIT It’s really fast paced but worth a listen.

It’s a camera/mask for diving. But I think it’d be more fun to wear while wandering around during the day. Don’t you? Especially with the little lights on.

So I recently purchased a Sigma 30mm F1.4 lens for my D40X. I wanted a sharper lens, with a wide aperture to play around with bokeh. I’m still such a newb when it comes to photography, but I’m having a lot of fun messing around with it.

It’s so much sharper than my Tamron 18-200mm that I sold that lens today. I don’t really miss the zoom that much, and for longer range shots I can just crop and end up with an image that’s as sharp as the Tamron.

And the shallow depth of field is a lot of fun for isolating specific things in the image. Now I’m considering picking up a 10-20mm Sigma for wide-angle indoor shots, specifically for a cafe review project.

I just used VOIP (skype) to call an Indian call center, from Korea, to activate my American debit card.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings.

The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association’s legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in.

Though their new strategy, issuing warnings and then getting ISPs to shut off service to file sharers, isn’t much better. And I wonder how legal it is.

This is interesting, Google is datamining search terms and their geographical origin to map out and graph flu epidemics. It matches up with CDC figures fairly accurately.

There’s a lot of data to be gleaned from search statistics, this seems like the tip of the iceberg, but interesting no less.

Also, this is part of Google.org — which “aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease.” Sounds good.

I’ve been wanting to get back into the research I was doing for my thesis on globalization, social organization/movement, and information technology. I’m going to use that as a partial excuse to buy a “netbook” computer, a tiny barebones laptop designed mainly for typing and surfing the net.

It fits in well with the mass-transit lifestyle here in Seoul where you’re limited to whatever size and weight you’re comfortable lugging around with you. Those 40 minute commutes on the bus or subway are also prime time for productivity (or napping). Most Koreans seem to use the time to watch incredibly popular and inane variety shows on their cell phones (I swear at times I feel like I’m living in a not-quite-but-almost nightmarish postmodern version of late 1950s America, but that’s fodder for a later post). Right now I’m thinking a tiny “netbook” would be good for reading journal article PDFs while riding, and for carrying around to write whenever I’ve got some downtime at work or at a cafe.

The sub-$500 price is nice too.

John Robb @ Global Guerrillas:

Google has filed patents to create deep sea floating platforms to house its massive data centers. Not only would these “barges” be economical (lower cooling and energy costs), they would be outside tax and enforcement jurisdictions of all nation-states. If this effort is successful, it could result in an effort to rapidly construct offshore facilities (spread out for robustness and built by a multitude of companies). Interestingly, since the core of most multinationals is now software (people are replaceable and/or interchangeable via outsourcing), the shift to offshore locations would make companies nearly invulnerable to state coercion.

Assuming feasibility, in some ways it could be a good thing, if it means avoiding stupid laws like the DMCA. But what about non-stupid, beneficial laws & regulations? How far does a “do no evil” motto go to curb potential abuses of monopoly power or legal invulnerability?

I thought about making a ‘cyberculture’ category for my postings, but is there really any point to distinguishing online from offline culture now that ‘cyberculture’ is mainstream? Is the line between the two, to the extent that it exists, largely irrelevant?

IT staff routinely snoop on users, riffling through their e-mails and personal files, a newly released survey has found.

Few ordinary users realize that one in three of their IT work colleagues are snooping through company systems, peeking at confidential information such as your private files, wage data, personal e-mails, and HR background, using admin privileges.

Source

The interface design for Google’s new live stock market app is pretty slick. All kinds of information convergence happening. Notice the way it links to news stories on top of the graph of the stock price.

I’m planning to build a cafe racer over the summer. This is an animated mock up I made. I took the photo of the stock bike and painted over it in photoshop to show what I want to do to it (bigger version here).

I think the bike will cost around $1500, plus another ~$500 to pick up a cafe style seat and new exhaust, etc.

With gas prices set to tick past $5/gallon, a 40+mpg bike sounds good to me.

After browsing through random food blogs, I feel compelled to meticulously and artistically document every mundane detail of life.

Plus photography is like instant gratification. Drawing or painting takes forever. This is like click click click – maybe a little processing in Photoshop – and bam, finished. Atleast that’s the plan… so now I’m saving for a D40.

Cold War era ekranoplans. Gotta love the Soviets.Check out 8:30 in, where they decide that adding missiles would be a good idea. Naturally.

NYT Magazine is featuring an article on Jan Chipchase, who has my dream job and whose “Future Perfect” blog is always worth a visit. He’s an anthropologist of sorts, a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist” employed by Nokia to roam the globe in order to identify how people, especially in emerging markets (i.e. developing countries), are actually using technologies; their social and environmental improvisations (sharing a phone with several people or dealing with lack of electricity), unique needs and wants, etc., in order to design new/better products and services.

The NYT article uses his job to highlight the wider role and potential of the cellphone in globalization and economic growth in the developing world.

“A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated [...] that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.”

“A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.”

This Ugandan improvisation for sending remittances through cellphones shows how people improvise with technology, and illustrates the need/market for virtual banking infrastructure in the developing world:

Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission.

Good read.

This graph from the NYT is interesting. Why do information and communications technologies tend to be adopted more quickly than, say,washing machines? Is one a luxury and the other a necessity? One is single purpose, the other  multipurpose? Higher value? Moore’s law? What of the lag in telephone adoption, versus the rapid spread of radio, way back when?

CNN running a story on consumer electronics infected with viruses from the factory…

In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.

So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control, perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing, rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.

Funny that Naver, a huge Yahoo style portal site in Korea, has a new “Simple Experience” that mimics Googles pared-down aesthetic.

Google, on the other hand, is using Flash buttons on their localized Google.co.kr site – the only Google country site that differs in style from their main US design.

I’ve never been a Mac fan. Proprietary systems and high prices are not cool. But now that you can run Windows on the new Intel based Macbooks, and given OSX’s Unix base, I am pretty much sold. The 2.5ghz core duo Macbook Pro is looking more and more appealing, especially as I type away on my 4 year old Dell.