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Monthly Archives: December 2008

2009 – the year in view

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Quite a few chickens are going to come home to roost in 2009. Many of these chickens have been stored up by the Republican administration in America as presents for the new administration, but some of them simply Are. Let’s do a quick review of the situation and look at some implications. The Modeling Crisis [...]

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Tim Minchin continues to apply for Saint of Science status

Wednesday, December 31, 2008
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Internet-only art forms

Friday, December 26, 2008
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Go vote for Akvo! Right now!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Here’s what we’re trying to win the USAID Development 2.0 challenge prize with: Our project focuses on the development of the Water Technology Assistant (WTA). The WTA is a cell-phone based application that provides an enhanced and localized interface to the world’s water technology resources in a format that field workers and villagers can use. [...]

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Bond: Class War

Sunday, December 7, 2008

I finally got around to seeing Quantum of Solace. Spoilerish micro-review continues after the most excellent alternative theme song. (via Jon) So Bond is really Britain’s equivalent to Uncle Sam. It hasn’t been John Bull for quite some time. As goes Bond, so goes the nation… Bond is a chav. He’s an ape in a [...]

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Mass translation architecture

Friday, December 5, 2008

100,000 pages * 80 languages == 8,000,000 pages. Plus versioning. We have enough cognitive surplus to do this kind of work. Appropedia or Where There Is No Doctor could provide the seed content. What’s needed is tools for mass translation – billions of translation events, quality reviewing, translation of versioned texts so that it’s easy [...]

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Video – what we don’t do

Friday, December 5, 2008

City of love HD from Leonardo Dalessandri on Vimeo. This is beautiful. Beautiful is expensive. Beautiful is hard. Beautiful needs the eye and the skill and the gear. We don’t do beautiful. At least, not routinely and often not by intention. Beautiful video costs 10 or 100 times what functional video costs. TV has to [...]

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