David Lidsky's Blog, page 4791

U.K. Kids Start Social Networking Way Under the Age Limit

A survey of kids in the U.K. has found that a quarter of them have a presence on a social network--way below the age limit of 13. As well as proving the theory that if you want to figure out your tech problems, go ask a tweenager, last year's Children's Media Literacy Audit from government watchdog Ofcom threw up some interesting gems. Let's check out the stats.

25% of the children surveyed admitted that they had a profile on either MySpace, Bebo, or Facebook.90% of their parents oversaw...

Yves Behar's Watch for Issey Miyake Makes Time Disappear [UPDATED]

Update: Since we published this piece, VersinnageTV has posted a nice interview with Behar, complete with an animatimon of the watch in action. Watch it below.

With its single hand, and pristine face, the Vue watch by Yves Behar for Issey Miyake makes an existential statement about the fleeting nature of time. "You have to look quickly," Behar told us in an early look. "You only see one number at a time. It's a view into the past and future."

In conceptualizing the design, Behar said he was...

Only a Bloody Pound: U.K.'s Times Gets An Online Paywall [Updated]

The long awaited sea-change in online newsprint has begun in earnest in the U.K., as two of its most popular and well-regarded broadsheets have announced paywalls. The Times and Sunday Times online will cost you from June. They're expensive too.

News International's chief exec announced the move today, noting it as a "crucial step" towards an "economically exciting" future for the news business. Twisty words, since the real issue is much more complex: These organizations are being forced to...

Animators Team Up to Fight Climate Change

Almost two-dozen designers are donating their time, to create an animated film about global warming.

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Over at GOOD, Jesse Ashlock points us to a remarkable experiment in crowd-souring for social good: For two years, British Animator Simon Robson has been working an animated manifesto, which aims to get people fired up about fighting climate change.

Robson, who works under the name Knife party, has a specialty in creating "issue animation," with themes borrowed from figures such as lefty...

When Innovation Goes Wrong: The 5 Creepiest Exercise Gadgets

Use your imagination. Or don't, actually--you might be mentally scarred.

The
fitness industry seems to roll out the next big thing about as often
and with as much fervor as gadget-mongers do. But like The Newton, some
exercise innovations just fail or fade away. For every FitBit, there's a Twisterciser; for every Bosu
Ball, there's a NordicTrack moldering in someone's basement.

There's three basic design challenges for any would-be fitness gadget: 1. Does it work? 2. Does it look...

China Demands Press Show Obedience to "Party and State," Hire Google Police

Sometimes it seemed, throughout the whole Google mess (and, recently, the ), that China just didn't really care that much. Google isn't as big a force in China as it is in the western world, and maybe the Chinese government acted so stiffly because they're not all that concerned. But today, the Washington Post published a list of directives from the Chinese government to Chinese news sites and organizations--and they are downright scary. This is the country behind the brief...

Daniel Libeskind's New Theater Opens, Offers Hope to Cash-Strapped Dublin

Daniel Libeskind's new theater is a stage within a stage within a stage. With Ireland's economy in tatters, it's a reaffirmation that even when times are tough, the show must go on.

The opening this week of Daniel Libeskind's new Grand Canal Theatre, a razzle dazzle production in its own right, threatened to upstage the gentle ballet on the building's main stage. With its dramatic, four story glass facade, sharply angled roof line, and turbulent diagonal lines, the debut of Libeskind's...

Photoshop CS5 Preview: Content-Aware Fill Is Magically Automatic

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Bryan O'Neil Hughes, one of the product managers of Adobe's Photoshop, let loose with a video that's tearing up the internet today, making nerds nationwide thrilled about the possibilities of even easier photo editing.

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The key item demonstrated here is called "Content-Aware Fill." Essentially, in CS4, the current version of Photoshop, some image cleanup tasks had a tendency to get tricky. Shadows, lens flares, and miscellaneous detritus often posed a real challenge to...

Simon Cowell to Receive International Emmy for Reshaping TV, Pants

Simon Cowell, the British Simon who isn't this Simon, is to be rewarded with an International Emmy later this year. The butch record promoter-turned-TV star and exec has, apparently, "reshaped television" (not to mention high-waisted pant styles and on-screen kisses.)

Cowell, who owns production company Syco, professed himself to be "delighted" by the award, which he will pick up in New York in November. President of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Bruce Paisner...

China Behind Yesterday's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter Outage

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While the World is pondering the complex final moves in the cultural conflict between Google and China's censors, the story has has taken a completely bizarre twist: For some reason, China's censorship firewall went briefly world-wide.

This seems to be an event that you'd dismiss as part of the twisty background plot in a James Bond movie, but it did happen: During the week, sysadmins around the World noticed that traffic that should have been happily flowing to sites such as YouTube, Twitter...