Monthly Archives: March 2006

Abductions

March 31, 2006 – 12:07 pm

I don’t know how I feel about shilling for the california dairy industry, but this cow abduction site is pretty funny. Be sure to watch the movie.

Want more, go look at mailorderchickens.org.

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)



The Aural Times

March 31, 2006 – 10:14 am

Thanks again to a good tip from Ryan, I’ve get something new to laugh at: The Aural Times.

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Books, Movies, Music, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

facts of life

March 31, 2006 – 3:17 am

A person will do certain things for money.

By Casey | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Did I Really Just Put This Together?

March 31, 2006 – 12:11 am

Huh. Noah Shachtman tells us that even with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, our military forces are spending $70 Billion to arm up for a new enemy. But whom? China. Then over here we’re reminded that China is the US’s largest creditor.

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

IdM Takes Lessons From the Microformats Crowd

March 30, 2006 – 9:46 pm

A tip from Ryan sent me looking at MicroID:

a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere.

The idea is to hash a user’s email address (or other identifier) with the name of the site it will be published on, giving a string that can be inserted — in true Microformats style — as an element of the html on the site.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (2)



…And A Mechanical Turk To Rule Them All

March 28, 2006 – 12:04 pm

Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon's Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I’d be foolish not to.

Foolish not to, but who wants to work at the behest of a computer? And that’s Paul’s complaint.

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Involvement, Inclusion, Collaboration

March 27, 2006 – 12:12 pm

Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan’s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are: it’s the opportunity to involve fans in the event planning and marketing process.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Twenty Years After Chernobyl

March 26, 2006 – 10:24 pm

Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the ?long shadow of Chernobyl? — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated ?exclusion zone.? The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the ?red forest? — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now. But the multimedia companion materials tell a somewhat more morose tale.

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (5)

Germaine

March 26, 2006 – 10:17 am

I found Germaine across from the Prudential Center Friday. His sound was good and I especially liked his snare drum.

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog | Comments (1)

Door of Mystery

March 25, 2006 – 10:02 pm

I found myself wandering about Boston Public Library for longer than I expected Friday. Part of it was the map exhibit and part of it was the architecture (and simply a place to relax for a bit). Amusingly, stairs and stairways seem filled with drama at BPL, and if the guard hadn’t just warned me about taking flash photos, I might have tried to sneak a peak behind that door.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog | Comments (2)

Questions Are All Around Us

March 25, 2006 – 4:58 pm

These pictures are mostly foolish, but here’s a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab — certainly not a cab with passengers — before this, so we were all rather curious about why. In front of us stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it’s the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

The Things They Do To Students At Rice

March 24, 2006 – 12:03 pm

I won’t say why I went looking for pictures of people getting poked with sticks (but you’ll figure it out in a later post). I will say I was happy to find these from the Poke-A-Spontaneous-Combustion-Member-With-A-Stick-Day at Rice University. Look, they even have a price list that includes:

  • $1
    • poke with a stick
    • song/poem on demand
    • two minute massage
    • lick a SC member
  • $2
    • picture with [unreadable]
    • kissing
    • whack with a stick
  • $3
    • marker tattoo
  • $4
    • attempt hedge jumping
  • $5
    • human piñata
    • shave a leg
    • we wrestle each other
  • $15
    • jump into hedges
By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)

Business Marketing Babble Makes Me Laugh

March 24, 2006 – 8:42 am

Competitive Intelligence: ?a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.?

Marketing: ?SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.?

Communications: ?In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.?

Sales: ?Who cares what it is. Let’s kill it and eat it.?

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (2)

Tomorrow In Human Computer Interaction

March 23, 2006 – 7:56 pm

My Dutch skills are weak to non-existant, and without a Google translator for MacArena.be, I’m pretty much stuck with staring at the above video and contemplating the short description provided:
A movie about the technology which Apple has recently patented. It is not a movie made by Apple but by some researchers.
Fortunately, this is an [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (2)

Facial Recognitition Spytech Goes Social

March 22, 2006 – 9:47 pm

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (4)