Linkpile

Linkpile

Linkpile

  • Inventor Saul Griffith learns the limits of technology: Shame the full text isn’t online: Great article on “the inadequacy of addressing complex societal issues with technological ingenuity alone. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than with Griffith’s main preoccupation these days: energy use and global warming.”
  • Reverse engineering the perfect (or worst) TED talk – Boing Boing: Somewhat amusing talk is based on “analyzing data” from past Ted talks to isolate the phrases, words, themes, even slide-color-schemes that are and are not effective with the TED audience. My favorite observation is that “it’s okay to fake intellectual capacity,” which can be achieved, for instance, by saying “etc., etc.” instead of “I don’t understand.” Haw.
  • Bad writing: What is it good for?: “The secret weapon of many writing workshop: Students often don’t get much helpful advice from critiques of their own work, as more than one teacher has confided to me. Instead, they learn the most from identifying the mistakes made by others.”
  • The hunt for universal music: “Psychologists are putting universality back on the agenda, and are investigating whether certain elements of music are hard-wired into the brain.”
  • For musicians, economy is the mother of invention: “Enterprising music makers are turning to the Internet and micro-financing through donations.”
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

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  • ‘One Hour Photo’: Exhibition of images that will “be disposed of” after one hour. “By forcing a shelf life on an art object [the show] takes aim at a Facebooking, Twittering world of mediated experience. We’re so busy reading about other people’s experiences that we have fewer and fewer experiences of our own. In “One Hour Photo,” you either see the picture or you don’t.”
  • The Limitations Of Today’s Soundproofing Magic & The Perennial Noise of Marketing: A note on trying to buy quietness.
  • Disabled Alt poses in risque photos for anti-American Apparel themed art project: Carles weighs in at Hipster Runoff.
  • The Year of the Drone: “Our study shows that the 129 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 34 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 898 and 1,336 individuals, of whom around 609 to 958 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 30 percent.”
  • Twitter: No matter what Hollywood thinks, it’s totally uncool for kids: “I don’t know one high schooler that uses Twitter,” says teen. Friend adds: “It’s something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something. Meanwhile: Twitter archive at Library of Congress could help redefine history’s scope.
  • When Fans Become Advertisers: Interview with Smallville superfan about efforts to fund, produce, and air a “professionally filmed” commercial on behalf of the show.
  • Webism: “From the first, and in no small part because of its fervent supporters, it has felt less like a technology and more like a social movement—like communism, like feminism, like rock and roll.” Some priceless stuff in this monumental essay. Also some junk, but it’s worth wading through that. (Bonus: A very rare CORRECT usage of the word eponymous!)
  • Surviving the Age of Humiliation: “All of us now live under the threat of easy and instant humiliation. It’s no longer just celebrities and business executives who need to think about aggressive reputation-protection and face-saving techniques. ‘Google yourself at least once a week,” advises Richard Levick, who heads a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. ‘You need to track what’s being said about you’ on blogs, message boards and social-networking websites.” While there’s a bit of a cranky worrywort tone to this piece, I think in places it’s getting at something legitimate.
  • Nothing can stop the spendthrift American: “Spending rose 0.6 percent, but income rose only 0.3 percent. For the third straight month consumer spending rose faster than income. Not uncoincidentally, the personal savings rate has declined to the lowest point in 18 months.”
  • A special report on television: The lazy medium: “There turns out to be an enormous gap between how people say they watch television and how they actually do. This gap contains clues to why television is so successful, and why so many attempts to transform it through technology have failed.” I look forward to the marketing guru class continuing to ignore this sort of information, and sticking with meaningless poll results to make their arguments.
  • How to Design Like You Give a Damn in 5 Easy Steps: The funniest headline I’ve seen in a while. Here’s a thought: If you need a “5 easy steps” primer on giving a damn, you don’t actually give a damn.
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

(0verflowing) Linkpile

Too many links. This is what happens when I skip a linkpile post. Sorry.

Linkpile

Linkpile

  • Brief meditative exercise helps cognition: “Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.”
  • Motivated Multitasking: How the Brain Keeps Tabs on Two Tasks at Once: So this study suggests that under some circumstances, “rather than being totally devoted to one goal at a time, the human brain can distribute two goals to different hemispheres to keep them both in mind.” But then the story quotes an expert contending that “the new work does not, however, show that the brain can actually execute two distinct tasks at precisely the same time.” Huh? Well is this evidence of something new or just the same continuous partial attention framework that’s already been established? I don’t get it.
  • The “recycled suit” totebag: From Poketo.
  • Dept. of startling cynicism: Art Fag City in retracting its (apparently false) accusation that Wooster Collective “had to be” getting money to hype the Banksy movie: “It never occurred to me that anyone would so aggressively promote a movie over twitter and [a blog] without payment.” Wow, is that what it’s come to?
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

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  • Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’: “Will put ads on Twitter, first in search results and later in user feeds both on Twitter.com and the myriad third-party clients that access the service.” Starbucks, Virgin America, Bravo to participate. Once again: Information wants to be ad-supported.
  • ideal bookshelves: Design*Sponge notes upcoming show of “ideal bookshelves” works by Jane Mount (noted here) at The Curiosity Shoppe.
  • On Being Good at Seeming Smart: The “paraphernalia” of smartness: “Poise, confidence (but not defensiveness), giving a moderate amount of detail but not too much, providing some frame and jargon, etc. But also, unfortunately, I suspect: whiteness, maleness, a certain physical bearing, a certain dialect (one American type, one British type), certain patterns of prosody.” Via Mind Hacks.
  • Visual aesthetics in early computing: 1950-1980. Via Coudal.
  • Supertaskers: I’ve read/heard many times that people who think they’re great multi-taskers (especially young people) usually aren’t. But this study says a small slice of the population (less than three percent) really can do two things at once, effectively. Since it’s Time magazine they have to come up with a hype name: “supertaskers.” That aside, the article is interesting. Via Mind Hacks.
  • German Firm Wins Right to Make Beer Called ‘Fucking Hell’: Couple of the pix in the slide show are quite excellent.
  • The Vintage Price Stickers Pool: On Flickr. A new standard in obsessive documentation of all things visual and consumption related?? Thanks to Shawn W.
  • The iPad Luddites: Nicholas Carr: “Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

  • The iPad Luddites: “Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”
  • Cildo Meireles’s Coca-Cola Project: “Meireles removed Coca-Cola bottles from normal circulation and modified them by adding critical political statements, or instructions for turning the bottle into a Molotov cocktail*, before returning them to the circuit of exchange.”
  • Branding Deals Come Early in the Filmmaking Process – NYTimes.com: Now, having Campbell’s Soup or Chrysler associated with your project can be nearly as important to your pitch as signing Tom Cruise.
  • 200 Examples of anti-Obama merchandise: During health care debate, 2008-2010. Via Coudal.
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

  • 200 Examples of anti-Obama merchandise: During health care debate, 2008-2010. Via Coudal.
  • The joy (and pain) of abundance: “The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things.” From a very enjoyable essay on aesthetics and abundance (including some thoughts about evolutionary factors that I’ve tried to articulate in the past, with little success, but that I agree with completely).
  • Digital decay and the archival cloud: Interesting Nicholas Carr rumination on potential threats to digital archives kept in “the cloud.” My impression is that a lot of people are thinking about these problems, and that we’re still likely to end up with a massive glut of digital “information.” The quality of what gets kept may vary widely, of course.
  • The nonexistent purpose of people: “When it comes to religion, most believers reason that we’re here ‘for’ some divine purpose. Even if they’re not particularly religious, people often reference some vague purpose to human existence, such as ‘to love one another’. As Albert Camus wrote, ‘revolt against man is also directed against God’. But many of us go one step further than this, saying that individual members of our species exist ‘for’ a special reason.” Via Mindhacks.
  • The ROFLCon II Schedule @ ROFLCon.
  • Can you judge an album by its cover?: Somebody is doing a study to find out. You can participate via this link if you like.
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

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  • Hurricane imagery in New Orleans: “Though the storms have always played a role in the mythology of the city, hurricane imagery increasingly has part of what defines New Orleans. I’ve spent quite a lot of time there recently, and I can attest that the hurricane is everywhere: in jewelry, in art, and on bodies, for example.” That’s someone’s claim. Thoughts, New Orleans people? True or false? Examples?
  • Really good fakes: The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction — is a tourist draw! “Replicas made with a palette of high-tech tools are changing the way tourists see art. [T]hese faithful fakes are the work of Madrid-based Factum Arte, a company that employs high-resolution 3-D scanners of its own devising to reproduce artworks.” Speaking authenticity and art: good story about the Rogue Duchamp Urinals.
  • Gentleman’s bulletproof pocket square: “Reykjavik designer Sruli Recht is selling a limited number of these kevlar pocket squares made from “military grade lemon aramid” fiber.”
  • Silence & Deafness: Disquiet previews “In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise” by George Prochnik, which sounds quite interesting.
  • The most useless machine ever!
  • Google Ads Will Now Follow You Across The Web: “Launched what it calls ad “retargeting.” If someone visits a page on an advertiser’s own site or YouTube channel, Google can now show a related follow-up ad to just that person when they visit another site which shows Google ads. Since there are millions of sites in the Google Content Network, chances are Google will see them again.”
  • Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour: “Subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds’ golden arches, can actually increase people’s reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns.” Via the invaluable Mindhacks.
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.