David Lidsky's Blog, page 4745

Apple Backtracks on Pulitzer Winner's iPhone App Rejection With Blazing Speed

Oops--how about this for some embarrassing backtracking? Apple's quickly moving to get a previously-rejected app by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore. It's original crime: ridiculing public figures. Way to set yourselves up as a target, Apple.

The recent fuss about Fiore's app centered on its recent rejection on "taste" grounds. We know Apple's app approval processes can sometimes be mysterious, confusing, incorrect, and amusing...but never before has a rejection seemed so surreal...

How Third-Party App Makers Plan to Survive Twitter's New Ad Blitz

Twitter has finally decided to start making money. They're buying or making services and software to fill the holes in their own business plan, and they've rolled out a plot for advertising, the first stage of which is called Promoted Tweets. All of that seems to spell trouble for the existing third-party Twitter infrastructure, including developers of apps, services, and even advertising.

So why aren't third-party app developers shaking with fear?

Twitter has never been shy about plans to...

Obama: We'll Go to Mars . . . in 25 Years or So

The President has finally revealed details of his plans for NASA, as part of a desperate PR trick to recover from criticism after he canceled the Constellation moonshot rockets. Mars is the new goal, a disappointing 25 years hence.

Obama, speaking late yesterday, said that he was "100% committed" to NASA and its future in space exploration and science. He underlined this by explaining exactly how some of the additional money he's pumping into NASA will be spent, which included provisions for...

How America's Top Military Officer Uses Business to Boost National Security

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Photograph by Olaf Blecker

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An Information Hound: Mullen grabs a few minutes to read the newspaper in his Pentagon office. | Photo: Olaf Blecker

Admiral Mike Mullen says the sea was his business. Now, as America's top military officer, he's reshaping strategy for a world in which economics and security are intertwined.

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On the evening of January 6, Admiral Mike Mullen got into his armored SUV and girded himself for the last meeting of his day. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been up...

Meet the Matrix, er, Elephant Trunk-Inspired Arm of Your Future Robot Overlord

Meet Festo, a prototype robotic arm that takes its design inspiration from the way an elephant's trunk moves everywhich way thanks to its series of highly-flexible muscle segments. Clever? Yes. On the way to real robots? Probably. Scary?...

Festo's design is actually a clever half-way house between a fully-articulated robot arm that mimics the musculo-skeletal structure of, say, a human arm (like Dean Kamen's Luke arm,) and a basic rotating-joint robot arm such as you might find currently in...

It's a Bird! It's a Crane! It's the Coachella Mascot

Today marks the annual pilgrimage of 100,000 sun-seeking music fans to the Southern California desert for the three-day Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Sure Jay-Z's playing. So are Thom Yorke, MGMT, DEVO, and Gorillaz--but there are also giant art and architectural installations created by a who's who of Southern California architects. This year, Crimson Collective, an L.A.-based group of artists, architects, and designers constructed Ascension, a 45-foot tall crane with a 150-foot...

National Stress Awareness Month, by the Numbers

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Typography by Julie Teninbaum

Americans are stressed. We stress about work, the economy, school, love, weight, Lost, even stress itself. Well, April happens to be National Stress Awareness Month -- and Stress Awareness Day is on the 16th. To mark the anxious occasion, here's a look at our angst in numbers.

Infographic: Under Pressure 

ONE-THIRD of American children ages 8 to 17 say they worry about their family's finances. Two other major sources of childhood stress are HOMEWORK &amp...

Wired Can't Quit Adobe, Pours Cash Into Flash-less iPad App

Wired magazine's efforts at producing an iPad imprint aren't going to be stifled by the spat between Adobe and Apple over Flash, apparently. The e-mag is plowing ahead--on a path paved with cash, apparently.

We're all familiar with the notion that the iPad can save newsprint and magazine publishing by now (good news for Wired magazine, whose very moniker sounds a bit dated in the wireless iPad era), and we've all seen several times the efforts by Condé Nast to transmogrify their...

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: Father of Photojournalism

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What is photography? What is a photographer? And, what is photojournalism today?

These three questions came to mind as I studied the 300 photographs at the new Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition that opened at MoMA last week. The show entitled The Modern Century focuses on the master's most productive decades, the 1930s through 1960s. Curated by Peter Galassi, the show features iconic images that brilliantly chronicle the joy and tragedy of the human condition, all in black and...

Has Google Hit the Ceiling?

Google has just released its first-quarter results and, unsurprisingly, they show that the search engine giant is still making healthy profits, despite the slight cock-up of the Nexus One launch and the China debacle. Profits were up 37% to $1.96 billion, while revenue was up 23% to $6.78 billion, although the firm's share price dipped by 4.6% on the news. Analysts gave a general thumbs-up to the results, pointing out that Google is a victim of its own success, as its investors were probably...