If you ask Paul Graham, Apple’s App Store process is starting to affect the Apple brand. He bought a shiny new 27″ iMac, but: So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings. I felt the way I’d feel buying something made in a country with a bad human rights [...] [Posted: 19 Nov 2009]
From Social Times, an interview with Lynne d. Johnson, Senior Vice President at the Advertising Research Foundation and a beloved member of my blog family. The interview begins with a look back at Johnson’s career and ends with some of her insights about social media marketing. For example: Even more than social media, digital content [...] [Posted: 19 Nov 2009]
From Karen Armstrong’s Foreign Policy piece: Think Again: God: Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very [...] [Posted: 19 Nov 2009]
From The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part I). a talk by Jorge Volpi. Latin America is extravagant and irrational, nothing can be done about it; its dictators are savages and inhumane, but we miss them as characters of a novel; and we find solace in its inhabitants’ ability to maintain their will to dream [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
Junot Diaz writes in O Magazine You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
boyd posted notes from her Web2.0 talk, “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media” As networked technologies proliferate around the world, we can assume that there is a channel of distribution available to everyone and between everyone. In theory, anyone could get content to anyone else. With the barriers to [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
From the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Debt Privilege: We all know too much debt is at the root of the economic crisis. And we’ve seen lots of step-back pieces on the conditions that created the environment for that debt creation—monetary policy, of course, but also the advent of securitization, the credit-default swap, etc. But we [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
From Vice magazine’s interview with University of California at San Diego professor Ricardo Dominguez and his Transborder Immigrant Tool. We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
From New York Times Well Blog post Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious: But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]
PHP Classes interviews Khaled Al-Shamaa about his AR-PHP project, a series of PHP classes designed to handle Arabic-language web applications. Because Arabic uses a non-Latin character set, it presents a new set of challenges. PC: Developing Web applications in Arabic requires special care. What are the most important concerns and what components do you provide [...] [Posted: 18 Nov 2009]