The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.
In contrast, in the global information order, countries that are disadvantaged could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination.
I don’t really understand the logic in the above statement, but, hey-let’s see where this goes!
It is not because the people of China do not want free flow of information or unlimited access to Internet, as in the West. It is just because they recognize the situation that their country is forced to face.
Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.
Yikes. China can create the second biggest economy in the world, send an astronaut into space, become the manufacturer for the world but it still needs its government to protect its people from themselves? Because apparently despite all their achievements over the past few years they are incapable of determining what is ‘true’ and what is a ‘lie’? What b.s. Kudos to Google for threatening to pull out.
Let’s speculate about how it might save journalism (or your industry of choice). It’s going to have to provide a great experience that’s fundamentally different from how it works today (check out this Sports Illustrated mock for one hypothesis). However, I think it’s going to have to make it really easy to pay for this content, too. Ads alone aren’t keeping these folks in business, so a new format alone (which is just more ad inventory) isn’t going to be enough.
So what could this mean? Well, imagine a monthly subscription to all New York Times content – across your tablet, iPhone and the web – with the first 100 articles or so free.
Similarly, right now it’s tough to do subscriptions for an iPhone app. You have to put the app in the store and then the subscription occurs within the app (e.g., it sells for $0.99 in the store but then it’s $9.99/month within the app to use it). I’m hoping that with the tablet, Apple will continue switching the store to allow transparent per month pricing at the time of purchase, with a free trial.
Ideally, two things come out of the tablet:
New ways to convince users to subscribe to content. Ideally, providing a ubiquitous payment system that works across all digital channels
An improvement to subscription pricing in the iTunes store
These sound totally banal, but if this happens it will suddenly be financially viable for a whole new type of software to be developed for the iPhone. Apple can build its mobile lead and really revolutionize a lot more than just journalism.
This quote below precisely encapsulates so much of what I am looking for in life:
When you actually see somebody doing amazing things, there’s no excuses for doing mediocre work. Seeing people who are super passionate about what they do, I think that creates a self-propelling hunger.
If you ever find yourself in Cobble Hill, be sure to check out any movie playing at the Cobble Hill Theater. They have easily created the best pre-movie house ad of all time. Watch closely for the chairs with lasers (alas, the chairs don’t really have lasers) at the halfway mark:
And, yes, that really was a request for you to a) not smoke and b) turn off your pager.
I was part of a team that recently submitted an app for the NYC BigApps contest and therefore had the opportunity to play with a lot of the data sets in the NYC Data Mine. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I wanted to suggest how the city can take a great resource and make it even better.
After combining nine data sets (and being unable to combine many others), we feel that we can talk to some of the challenges in working with the data and the overall opportunity to improve it. Our main suggestion is that the City should think of itself as a platform that provides standardized data and end users like ourselves add value by bringing together the different data sets and 3rd party services. We can’t claim to have created the “government as a platform” idea, but we can tell you some of the issues New York City faces if this is the path you (hopefully) take.
With that, here are a few suggestions:
Make all your data machine readable. Some of your data is incredibly rich, but buried in formats that are hard to parse. The best example is probably the community district demographic info: there are over 100 spreadsheet pages of rich data there, but it’s incredibly difficult to use in CSV form. Ideally, this would all simply be XML and it could be reused in seconds.
Open source formats please. Some of your data is locked in proprietary formats, accessible only to users with multi-thousand dollar software packages (a great example are the gdb files for ArcView shape data). If you want random citizens like us to mash up your data, please provide the data in exclusively open source formats as our software budget is $0. (It looks like this is changing – I noticed that some of the gdb files at the Data Mine now include shape files as well. Kudos)
Add lat/longs (the commercial standard for mapping services) to every address/point. Some of your address data consists just of addresses without lat/longs. Some of these (e.g., certain school locations) are improperly formatted, so we can’t use commercial systems like the Yahoo Geocoding API to calculate lat/longs and put them on a map or assign them to a district/neighborhood. Other files contain lat/longs but they’re in a different coordinate system: this means that developers need to convert them into lat/longs in order to map them – and this process introduces errors and takes unnecessary time.
More documentation. Some of your files contain lots of data but lack the documentation necessary to make them usable. The best example are the health info shape files: they’re full of statistical data for different areas, but there’s no way to figure out exactly what each of the statistical values means. Similarly, the shape files for each community district contains their area – but there’s no unit of measurement (it’s something called ‘internal units squared’).
More data. You gave us some great data to play with, but there’s still a ton more. What about Compstat for crime data? School scores and their trends over time? The location of different alarm boxes so we can see how response times vary by area?
These suggestions are meant entirely as an opportunity to build off of a great start. We – the people of New York – want to work with the city to help make it a better place. However, the value we add is in creating tools and finding hidden relationships in the data – not in standardizing it; that’s where you can make the system work.
If you provide us with well-formed, machine-readable, standardized data, we’ll help build the services that citizens need and free up the city’s resources to focus where they’re needed most. We’ll also find new relationships in the data that might help you rethink policy initiatives (see how your data suggests an interesting link between ‘education’ and ‘going green’; I’ve no idea if you knew this).
2009 was a great start for a more open NYC.gov. Can’t wait to see what you do in 2010.
I’m back home in Ottawa for Christmas and I had the chance to get to our National Gallery to check out their collect. Early Canada was a rough time for painters; outside of Cornelius Krieghoff there just wasn’t a lot of talent in the country until the Group of Seven came along. This means that when you go to the National Gallery, breeze through the first couple of rooms and wait until you get to about 1900; that’s where the fun begins. If you go, check out the following paintings to get a sense of Canada’s contribution to painting.
Note: my blog template resizes the images badly. Try opening any of the images below in a new window to get a sense of what they really look like.
CW Jefferys – Western Sunlight, Last Mountain Lake. If you stare at this painting in the gallery, you can make out the faintest shades of pink in the sky. If you’ve spent any time on the Prairies, you can relate to this.
Tom Thomson – The Pool. Anyone who has spent a fall in Ontario knows exactly where this comes from.
Tom Thomson – The Jack Pine. Possibly the most famous Canadian painting. Many a child grew up staring at this on a place mat.
Jean Paul Riopelle – Pavane. Fast forward 30 years. Canada is a more urban (but definitely not urban) society. This is reflected in a new artistry. You can’t tell from below, but Riopelle’s canvasses are massive. The work below is roughly 10×20 feet. His brushstrokes are as much a part of the painting as the colour and the composition.
Marcel Barbeau – Nataskhouan. This is possibly my favourite piece of Canadian art. When you stand close to it, it occupies your entire field of view and the canvas begins to dance in front of your eyes.
Gershon Iskowitz – Seasons, No.1. Little globules of colour float across a massive canvas.
Claude Tousignant – Gong 88, No. 1. At first this seems like a silly visual trick: a bunch of bullseyes of different colours. However, as you stare relentlessly at the center of the painting, all colour merges into one. If you blink, the whole scene flashes before you eye and you realize that there is a picture within the picture…
Just for fun, here are some shots from the building itself. The Moshe Safdie-designed Gallery is probably one of the best buildings of the 1980’s (a true rarity).
I pride myself on being a quick runner, but this is ridiculous. Wen and I were using my iPhone to navigate from New York back to Ottawa, courtesy of Google maps. They were kind enough to give us a lot of options: by car, by bus or by foot. I was interested in how long it would take by foot. Turns out only five days:
That’s not too bad, right? 400 hundred miles in 5.5 days. Totally doable, right? Oh wait, that’s six miles an hour 12 hours a day. What’s interesting is that the average finish time for a man in a marathon is ~4:30 – or about 5.8 miles/hour. I guess we all just need to learn how to run faster than average marathons back to back to back to back and then we’ll have a similar fitness level to those at Google!
(Note: this is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek post. It’s awesome that you can drive around and get on the fly directions. Just might need a little bit more work on those ‘walking’ ones)
Yesterday was the year’s last installment of the New Amsterdam Market. It’s New York’s most charming farmer’s market and is held in one of it’s most charmless locations (underneath the FDR by the old Fulton fish market). The market is a celebration of the passion and craft of local and regional food artisans. Whether you’re looking for bread, meat, cheese, chocolate, coffee or olive oil, the common thread is an insatiable passion in the topic by whoever is selling to you.
This leads to some outlandishly enjoyable situations: below is a photo of the folks from Prime Meats selling duck confit hot pockets. Unbelievably delicious and yet ridiculous at the same time.
The other great find at the market was Sarah Obratis’ & Hugue Dufour’s meat pies. Technically, the weren’t actually at the market, which meant that you had to literally buy a pie out of the trunk of their Corolla (it all felt very surreptitious). The tourtiere’s have a mouth-watering mix of meat – brisket, pork and turkey – and come with their own Cranberry-based tomato sauce. Ours lasted two days (really, more like 28 hours).
A few weeks back, Wen and I went to see Richard Mosse’s The Fall at the Jack Shainman gallery (more Mosse photos). Mosse is a great photographer who travels to the edges of the world to capture images of catastrophe and then prints them on a massive scale. I highly recommend reading his recent interview over at BLDGBLOG (then read the older one). This paragraph captures the spirit of his work:
So how is the catastrophe popularly represented? Through terrorism. Terrorism is a gesture of advertising; it’s a literary act, a form of representation, before all else. Its aim is not primarily to kill, but to capture the popular imagination through killing. It’s for this reason that I’m drawn to the air disaster: there is no finer, more succinct, more international, and more culturally loaded expression of the catastrophe than a plane crash. An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity’s complete failure.
Here are some shots of his work from the exhibit; I’m aware you’re not supposed to take photos in art galleries, but his works are magnetic and I couldn’t help myself:
Today I went to an exhibition at the Met called Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868. It has given me a new appreciation for how absolutely insane Japanese culture is. First, let’s take a look at some of the different helmets that Samurai might wear into battle:
If you were to ask “Lindsay, isn’t one of those helmets done up to look like a swallow’s tail? And is the other one a set of crabs claws?” you’d be absolutely correct. Apparently the Samurai helmet was the early equivalent of taking your shoe off and banging it on your desk at the UN – an attempt to intimidate your enemy by convincing them that you were crazier than they were.
Their armor certainly suggests that. Granted, to a jaded 21st century dweller, it looks like the sort of costume a psychopathic midget who worships the Village People might wear (the armor dates back to the Middle Ages and the Japanese were quite short back then), but I can only imagine how exceptionally nutty it would look when combined with a very sharp sword.
If you look closely at the images below you’ll notice a few things. First, everyone’s wearing a mask to look a little crazier – although the mustaches undermine it. Second, the guy with brown hair actually does have hair coming out of his helmet-there’s some sort of animal pelt there; a different set of armor (not shown) actually had long, flow, dyed red hair attached to it. Finally, the red outfit suggests where Darth Vader comes from.
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