David Lidsky's Blog, page 3422
October 24, 2013
Twitter Hires NBC News's Vivian Schiller As Head Of News
Twitter has confirmed that Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer for NBC News, will be joining the social network in January.
Schiller, who has been at NBC News for two years, will oversee news and journalism partnerships at Twitter. The company originally posted a job listing for a Head of News and Journalism role back in May, seeking candidates with "a strong vision for the broad potential of Twitter and news." Responsibilities in the job description included "devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks."
Schiller, who held top roles at NPR and The New York Times, has focused on creating better user experiences for readers. She spoke of the value of innovating and learning for Fast Company's 30–Second MBA series:
Floppy House: Abandoned Building Reinvented With A Slouchy Facade
As is often the case with art or any form of cultural production, the sculpted object usually bears little to no trace of the immense efforts that gave rise to it. So is the case with "From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes," the newest work of British artist and designer Alex Chinneck. What you see is the facade of a brick rowhouse behaving in the manner of sliced American cheese (that is, floppy). What you don't see even a hint of is the arduous, often bureaucratic, process Chinneck maneuvered for a year and a half to make the house happen.
The four–story home stands in the heart of Margate, an easterly English seaside town known for its pockets of stately architecture. Chinneck's intervention was entirely self–initiated, and he had to secure both the property and financing from independent sources. First he was required to win the approval of the local municipal council, which was granted as part of a wider arts and regeneration initiative in the area. He then spent close to six months soliciting free materials and equipment from British construction companies, a hard–won campaign that laid the groundwork for the £100,000 project. "Every yes followed 25 no's," Chinneck tells Co.Design.
[image error]Fortunately, the surreal slapstick and winking affability of the installation makes up for an awful lot in the end. The neat brick–and–mortar facade appears to have lost its bearings and slipped downward, settling into an impossibly slouched position. The wall remains perfectly intact, with rows of windows framing frilly lace curtains and a front door that seemingly opens onto a sewage tunnel below. The slippage exposes the decaying interiors of the house, which has been vacant for more than a decade.
NYC Is Swapping Out 250,000 Streetlight Bulbs With LEDs
The familiar yellow hues of New York City's street lights will, over the next four years, be replaced by stark, eco–friendly, LED bulbs. Thursday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg, along with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik–Khan, announced the plan to replace all 250,000 or so light bulbs in the city. "Using LEDs for street lighting is more than just a bright idea," Sadik–Khan said (in a worn–out pun). "It's a necessity for sustainable cities to operate more efficiently while also delivering clearer, better quality light for New Yorkers."
Since LED lights last 20 years, compared to six years for the current high–pressure sodium lights, the administration claims the program will save the city $6 million in energy costs per year. Industry estimates are more conservative about the life–span for LEDs, putting it at 12 years. Still, the bulbs reduce energy consumption by 30% to 50% compared with the current bulbs. Additionally, the extended usage means fewer maintenance costs for city lamps. That should save the city $8 million in maintenance a year.
Despite all the environmental and financial benefits, some city dwellers might find the new look harsh. When Boston implemented a similar change, some residents complained. "It was like my eyes were busted," one agitated city dweller told the Boston Globe. Some Angelinos likened the new look to "floodlights." So brace yourselves, New Yorkers, for brighter lights, big city.
See More Fake Beers From Movies and TV Shows Than You Could Possibly Drink
Several pop culture creations have gone on to inspire beers in their likeness, but way more have had inspired choices of fake brews hidden in plain sight during the movies and shows themselves.
An easy way to avoid product placement is inventing your own brands and putting them in characters' hands. The generic–looking brew your hero is sipping will either go unnoticed by viewers who groan at cross–platform shilling––or provide an extra joke. A new chart gathers 71 fictional brews together so you can see which ones merit more attention than others.
[image error]Click to expandCreated by Pop Chart Labs, Fantastical Fictive Beers displays suds from an international range of movies and shows. Some are regional–based, like Family Guy's Pawucket Patriot Ale, to help ground the show in a world. Others are plot–based, like Lost's Dharma Initiative Beer. Some are silly, like Laughing Clown Ale from Talladega Nights. Others just sound cool, like From Dusk Til Dawn's Cerveza Chango. And a ton are from fake commercials on Saturday Night Live.
Hey, Cyclists: This LED–Powered Backpack Could Save Your Life
There are more cyclists than ever in cities today, a fact that isn't lost on city planners and administrators. Streetscapes are changing accordingly, as they are amended to accommodate bike lanes. The result is a healthier urban environment with a robust transport network.
But tensions inevitably arise when such different transportation beasts as cars and bikes travel side–by–side in such intense proximity. Drivers don't always respect the line of demarcation separating the two vehicles. Bike lanes aren't treated with the deference afforded car throughways, so cyclists are frequently forced to dart into the main road (or onto sidewalks) to avoid collision. Then there's the fact that people, whether in cars or on bikes, can behave recklessly to the point of injuring, or at least antagonizing, those with whom they share the road.
[image error]How, then, to negotiate the two different, but equally vital forms of transport? Seoul–based designer Lee Myungsu thinks he has an answer. A car owner who often commutes to his studio by bike, Myungsu devised a backpack that amplifies a cyclist's visibility on the road. The SEIL bag (pronounced Zail) lights its wearer up and indicates to surrounding traffic in which direction the cyclist is headed––no dweeby, though very important, hand signals required.
How Do You Reverse Engineer A Song?
How do you learn to play an instrument, or to make the question even simpler, how do you learn to play a new song you just discovered? Maybe chord charts if it's popular enough, maybe dozens of web searches, but more likely you're stuck trying to figure the song out on your own. Since software is continually improving to the point of being able to auto–detect chords from any song in your iTunes library, there are new options available. Billed as the main new feature, the Mac app Capo 3 automatically extracts chords, as well as tries to be a musician's reverse–engineering toolkit by relying on computing power and plenty of code.
The flip side to using machines and offering a magical experience––if it works and a terrible one if it doesn't––is human power to reverse engineer songs. Soundslice doesn't currently use any algorithms to pick out chords like Capo, instead the company is building tools and interface elements to help users more easily annotate the music as well as share it. So which is the better way to dissect a song to learn its parts?
"Capo aims to be a tool that unapologetically goes out there and gives you a fighting chance of filling in the blanks," says Capo developer Chris Liscio. The program actually started off as a way for users to slow down the speed of songs without changing the pitch, a key feature to learning to play a song by ear. The second version added chord detection, but only visual cues, so the user still had tell the program what note was being played. In the latest version just released, Capo continues to pursue a brute force type method of trying to automatically detect and display the chords on top of the app's unique spectrograph.
October 23, 2013
This Futuristic Indoor Garden Is Also A Groovy Fish Tank
Good news for all you aspiring urban farmers: there's now a new way to grow a pesticide–free garden right inside your tiny apartment. Two law school students with a passion for renewable food sources and one aquaponics expert with experience in farming have designed the Aqualibrium Garden, an indoor method for cultivating food all year round.
The Aqualibrium Garden is a series of stackable chambers that functions as both garden and aquarium. Once the crates snap together, they create an aquaponic system for growing edibles at home. Aquaponics is a symbiotic system where water circulates from the fish tank below and up into the soil of the garden. The fish, snails, or crawfish supply nutrients (read: poop) that fertilize the soil and aid in plant growth. The plants, which are warmed by a built–in LED grow light, subsequently filter the water, returning fresh H2O back to the fish tank. (And if the idea of keeping both fish and plants alive seems daunting, there is a hydroponic option allowing gardeners to simply add nutrients to the water.)
[image error]"People in urban environments typically don't have the necessary environment for growing their own food," says Joshua Rittenberg, CEO of Aqualibrium. "Right now, there is no product on the market that allows for substantial food production using either aquaponics or hydroponics that is designed for urban living and is cost–effective."
Look At All These Guns People Are Selling On Instagram
If you're social–media savvy and in the market for a gun, here's the perfect, completely unregulated market just for you: Instagram. A simple search on the service using a hashtag like "forsale" will surface a host of "semi–anonymous private and professional dealers" advertising and peddling firearms, as The Daily Beast reports. It mostly works like Craigslist. "Asking $3000 for everything," a seller might say, eliciting bids right under the photo, until the conversation eventually travels elsewhere to complete the deal.
[image error]Except on Craigslist, none of that would be permitted under its policy against arms dealing; on Instagram, it is. Since the main purpose of Instagram is to enhance photos of babies and food, the photo app doesn't have any implicit weapons–sales policies. Without an official policy from Instagram, selling guns online is "complicated," but not necessarily illegal, says The Daily Beast.
[image error]Of course, that doesn't mean it's a good way to buy or sell a gun. "We are definitely concerned about the public safety implications of unregulated online gun sales, primarily the ability of sellers to skirt background checks and trafficking in firearms––both legal and illegal guns––to prohibited persons," Sam Hoover, a staff attorney with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence told The Daily Beast.
A Shimmering Forest Of Ice, Made From Hot Glue And Urea
For his latest installation, "Vertical Emptiness," Osaka–based artist Yasuaki Onishi turned the Kyoto Art Center into a beautiful ice–world forest like something out of Narnia. Tree branches are hung upside down from the ceiling, drizzled with strands of hot glue like spider silk. Onishi sprays the branches with liquid urea, which then crystallizes. The delicate structure that connects ceiling to floor appears shagged with silver–white ice, standing in stark relief in front of a large black panel of glue and graphite.
In a short, dreamy video about the exhibition, Onishi describes his design process, saying, "I don't make elaborate pieces. The way I work is applying some treatment to existing forms."
In his previous work, too, Onishi managed to use the simplest of materials to transform gallery spaces into fantastical, haunting dreamscapes. And "Vertical Emptiness" isn't the first time Onishi has invested heavily in hot glue––in "Reverse of Volume," a site–specific installation at the Rice Gallery in Houston, black glue strands suspended a diaphanous white sheet in mid–air. At the Kyoto Museum, the artist used black lights and fluorescent paint to create rave–y, space–age scenes.
Starbucks Wants To Make Tea The New Coffee By Opening A "Tea Bar"
Try to walk five blocks of any major city in the U.S., and you're bound to come across at least one of Starbucks's 13,279 coffee shops. And if Starbucks has its way, a cup of tea could be the next cup of Joe.
The coffee giant will open its first tea bar tomorrow under the Teavana Fine Teas brand it acquired last year. You won't find coffee at the Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bar shop, which is located in New York City's swanky Upper East Side neighborhood, but instead you can purchase various teas, novelty tea–based drinks, and small plates for between $3 and $15. Accordingly, CEO Howard Schultz told reporters he expects the average Teavana purchase to be higher than one at Starbucks, though the tea bar may not receive as many total customers on a given day.
The tea bar as a destination spot is also a strategy shift for the Teavana brand, which currently operates about 300 retail locations, mostly in shopping malls, that sell unprepared loose–leaf teas and brewing accessories, rather than freshly made drinks and food. Schultz says he plans to bring more Teavana shops to urban areas.
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