David Lidsky's Blog, page 3371
December 23, 2013
A Photographic Tour Of The Notorious Hotel Chelsea
Before extensive renovations, one last look inside the notorious hotel where Sid killed Nancy and where Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road.
Perhaps no other New York City building has been so simultaneously charmed and haunted as the Chelsea Hotel. Most infamously, it was the place where Sex Pistol Sid Vicious stabbed girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death in 1978. This wasn't the first death at the Chelsea, though. In the 1950s, poet Dylan Thomas died of drink and pneumonia while staying there. Twenty years later, Leonard Cohen would meet Janis Joplin at the hotel and they'd go on to write the song "Chelsea #2" in 1974. Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Madonna, Alice Cooper, Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix, and Robert Crumb were among its notorious guest list.
This Dinner Plate Cleans Itself
Hate doing dishes? So do we. Luckily, this remarkable plate could make that job a thing of the past.
Doing the dishes stinks, and even expensive dishwashers designed for the task don't make the job all that easy. But a new self-cleaning plate and bowl, developed by the Swedish design studio Tomorrow Machine and research company Innventia, could make the chore obsolete.
Stop Giving Employees Cash Bonuses
New research suggests a better kind of year-end reward.
A Christmas Carol makes a strong existential case for year-end bonuses, but it's far less instructive on which type of bonus works best. Indeed, the evidence on that count is conflicting. Individual, performance-based bonuses can boost morale at the cost of coworker competition, while team-based bonuses can elevate cooperation at the cost of free-loading. It's enough to make you wonder whether Scrooge wasn't so much a miserly old crank as a frustrated manager.
What Architecture Schools Get Wrong
The new film Reality Check follows a year in the life of Virginia Tech's design/buildLAB, bringing a long-simmering debate over architecture education to the screen.
In 2012, a group of students at the Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design came together to build Clifton Forge, Virginia, a community amphitheater. As part of Virginia Tech professors (and married couple) Keith and Marie Zawistowski's design/build LAB, the third-year undergraduate students spent an entire academic year conceiving the project and working with the community to bring it to fruition.
MIT Engineers Invent A Cameraless Tracking System That Sees Through Walls
WiTrack, a prototype designed at MIT, can track your movements anywhere in a house, even through walls.
In the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark never has to worry about interacting with JARVIS, the artificial intelligence in his "smart home," by making sure that he stays in proper view of a motion-tracking camera. He just walks anywhere he damn well pleases, barks orders and waves his hands, and JARVIS is somehow able to track him. Now a team of engineers at MIT has created a system called WiTrack which could offer the same kind of experience. It's a 3-D motion-tracking system like Kinect, except it doesn't use cameras and it can track you anywhere in a house, even through walls.
December 20, 2013
An iPhone Accessory To Make You Stop Using Your iPhone
This holiday concept from Wolff Olins reminds us to back away from our phones and spend some time with our loved ones.
If we had one mass societal realization in 2013--beyond the fact that privacy as we know it is dead--it's that we need to unplug. All of these convenient screens have sucked our attention away from the ones we love.
The Recommender: Jill Bernstein, Fast Company's Editorial Director (Not Iron Chef Judge)
The three best things Fast Company's Editorial Director found on the Internet this week.
[image error] Role at Fast Company: Editorial DirectorTwitter: @jill_bernstein
Titillating Fact: Twice, about six or seven years ago, Jill was invited to be a judge on Iron Chef America. "One of the episodes has aired repeatedly ever since, and people think that somehow it's what I do for a living, which is funny. Cooking has definitely always been interesting to me, though. One of my favorite things to do is read old cookbooks, like "The Picayune's Creole Cookbook" from 1901, which a friend gave me recently. Few of the recipes in these books are anything I'd ever want to try myself, but taken together they offer this amazing window into a particular time and place--what technology was available, what foods were accessible and in fashion, how things were presented--and served by whom, to whom. Even "The Joy of Cooking," which is originally from the 1930s, has, amid the sponge cakes and casseroles, a recipe for how to skin, fillet, and cook a muskrat.
The "Netflix For Books" Business Model, And How It'll Change The Way You Read
Mark Coker of Smashwords, which recently inked a major content deal with Scribd, weighs in on how the all-you-can-read model changes the way we read, how authors make creative choices, and how everyone gets paid.
Is a "Netflix for e-books" nearing viability? Yesterday, Smashwords, the largest distributor of self-published e-books, announced a new deal with Scribd, the document-sharing platform that has reinvented itself as an e-reading service, including an $8.99 all-you-can-read plan. "They're trying to do for e-books what Spotify does for music and Netflix does for films," Mark Coker, the CEO of Smashwords, told Fast Company.
BlackBerry's Last Gasp
Failing smartphone maker BlackBerry just changed its business after announcing a $4 billion loss.
BlackBerry just reported its third quarter results: It managed to make $1.2 billion in revenues, down from $1.6 billion in the previous quarter. But, due to continuing operations, it converted those revenues into an operating loss of $4.4 billion. Yup. Billion.
Hey Super Bowl Fans, Ready For Some Blipping? 20 Million Pepsi Cans Feature AR App
Not familiar with Blippar? You will be soon. The beverage maker tapped the augmented-reality platform to bring its Super Bowl XLVIII marketing to life.
Earlier this week, Pepsi began rolling out a new can to celebrate the culmination of the football season--and they should be hitting store shelves throughout the Northeast any minute now.
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