“This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.”
Tag: 03.12.12
Gore Says Democracy Has Been Hacked, And It’s Time To Occupy With Digital Tools
“Gore talked of a ‘Wiki-democracy’ of ‘digital flash mobs calling out the truth’ and ‘a government square that holds people accountable.'”
New Boss Works To Turn Israel Ballet Around
General manager Lea Lavie, who began working at the company in 2009 and replaced co-founder Hillel Markman on relatively short notice late last year, is working on eliminating an accumulated deficit of roughly $1.6 million, increasing audience (attendance has nearly doubled since she arrived), and introducing some basic business practices to the company’s administration.
Better Living Through Virtual Reality
“The shift to a world where virtual experiences are common – and almost as intense and meaningful as real ones – presents powerful psychological opportunities.” Says the head of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory, “We think virtual reality is a way to change very entrenched behaviour.”
The Spam E-Mail That People Made Friends Over
“The more people replied, the more people demanded to be removed, and in increasingly hostile tones. … Then, a strange thing happened. Camaraderie broke out amid the spam. … Dozens of people traded contact information. And just like that, what started as a petty annoyance, a blight common to our interconnected lives, became something quite different.”
Who Should Control E-Book Pricing?
“The launch of an antitrust probe against book publishers, which the US Department of Justice has threatened, couldn’t have come at a weirder time.”
Researchers Claim To Have Found Leonardo Fresco
“Tiny probes, sent through drilled holes in Giorgio Vasari’s The Battle of Marciano in the Palazzo Vecchio, found black pigment also used in the Mona Lisa, project workers claimed.”