pri82yogya

Kim Kardashian Akan Beralih Jadi Komedian

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:11:00 PDT

- Pamor sebagai bintang reality show sepertinya suah tak menarik lagi bagi Kim Kardashian. Pasalnya, artis 31 tahun ini akan segera berganti haluan menjadi komedian. Seperti apa ya jadinya?

Hal itulah yang diungkapkan salah satu sumber dekat Kim. Seperti dilansir dari The Sun, wanita yang dikabarkan sedang sedang dekat dengan Kanye West tersebut sempat mengungkapkan keinginan untuk memiliki acara sitkom sendiri.

"Dia benar-benar ingin berganti haluan dari bintang TV menjadi seorang aktris komedi," ungkap sumber tersebut.

Sumber tersebut juga mengungkapkan bahwa Kim ingin jadi the next Sofia Vergara. Bagi Kim, sosok Sofia adalah panutan yang pas untuk meraih impiannya sebagai bintang komedi.

"Kim ingin jadi the next Sofia Vergara," lanjutnya.

Baru-baru ini, Kim dan keluarganya dikabarkan telah menandatangani kontrak senilai £24,5 juta untuk perpanjangan acara KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS yang telah melejitkan namanya. Rupanya uang itu masih belum cukup, ya? :) (sun/ris)

How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Tue, 29 May 2012 05:16:00 PDT

Look, Google, we've got a plan to help you win on social. There's only one catch: You have to give up on the notion that animates Google Plus.

Out in the Mojave Desert, there's a place called California City that's fascinated me ever since Geoff Manaugh brought its story to the Internet's attention. The city is one of the largest in the state by land area, but its population sits at a mere 14,718. The facts together indicate the grandeur of the planned community's conception and its failure.

tl;dr version

Google Plus is an abandoned city in the desert.
I.e. "Google's social tool (G+) has no community and its communities (Books, Scholar) lack social tools."
Google can still win the social war.
But only if it A) abandons the operational idea of Google Plus and B) empowers the users of its existing products.

As pitched by the town's founder Nat Mendelson, California City would be the home of the American dream, a wonderland for sun and job seekers to go after Los Angeles' population burst across that city's eastern mountains. In 1957, land was purchased; roads were roughly paved; street signs were hammered into place. All Mendelson and his investors needed were the people ...

Who did not arrive as expected.

Those people did stop going to Los Angeles. But they didn't head to the enormous planned community taking shape in the Mojave. Instead, they headed to places like Phoenix. In 1955, the town had 350,000 people. By 1990, it had broken 2 million. California City languished, its grid still cut into the ground and viewable on Google Earth (see below). Instead of a megalopolis, California City became a set of half-built infrastructure. Growth went where people were already gathering naturally. They did not want to move out to the middle of nowhere, no matter how great the golf courses looked in the brochures.

Google/Alexis Madrigal

* * *

Last year, Google, which had dabbled in official social-networking applications, released Google Plus. The site has all the things you've come to expect in a social network. There is a rich profile builder, a place for your photos, a nice videochat feature, a conversation feed, and, of course, "Circles," which allow users to sort the people they know into different buckets. Word at the time was that Google's full weight was behind this social push. The journalists who knew the company's insiders best declared that Facebook was CEO Larry Page's obsession.

I was bullish about Google Plus, even if it did feel like a Facebook clone. Google had built out a ton of infrastructure and was pushing Plus out through its major products. This had to be big!

But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are "on" Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there's nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook's Los Angeles.

Google, of course, vehemently disputes that the social network is anemic. They say not to trust the methodology of the people who measure public posts. They tell you that more private sharing occurs than public sharing. They say that the service is growing by every metric that matters to Google.

For example, here's what a Google spokesperson told me about one third-party report:

"By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we've said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately - you don't have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world."

But it is simply impossible to ignore that few people actually *use* Google Plus in any way that we've come to define usage of a social network. ComScore says people spent about 3 minutes a month at the site. Google contends that doesn't include mobile traffic or the dropdown menu that appears when you click the red "notification" icon in Gmail and other Google services. But neither of those places seems likely to change the overall pattern here. Deep engagement is not lurking in that dropdown. Let's say actual G+ usage is 10x what the numbers say, so 30 minutes. Facebook's at 405. Pinterest's at 89. Tumblr is at 89, too.

Another small piece of evidence: I added up all the links from plus.url.google.com to The Atlantic. In total, we received 16,000 visitor referrals from the site. That ranks it in the low 30s for us and that sum is orders of magnitudes smaller than we get from some of Google Plus' competitors. BuzzFeed assembled some similar evidence on +1s from around the web along with a devastating excoriation of the site experience.

"Logging into Google+ feels like logging into a seminar, or stumbling into the wrong conference room at an airport Marriott," John Herrman wrote. "It looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital."

Ouch. So what gives? How could Google have invested so much money and credibility in building a service that, by all accounts except Google's own, doesn't work?

* * *

One hypothesis, advanced by TechCrunch's Josh Constine, is that we in the media completely misread Google Plus. The service was not an attempt to compete with Facebook. It was not a declaration of social war. No, it was a classic Google approach to social: develop a method to extract and organize information, but this time about the humans. So, they gave us something that looked like Facebook with familiar text boxes to fill in. They tricked us into inputting ourselves into their database with the promise of a great service. On this theory, it doesn't matter to Google if we use G+ because we already gave them our names, locations, interests, and webs of social connections.

And if they get some users clicking on +1 buttons for advertisements, that increases their engagement rate substantially for those users' friends.

"We are seeing 5 to 10 percent click-through-rate uplift on any ad that has a social annotation on our own Web sites," Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering, told the New York Times. "We have been in this business for a long time, and there are very few things that give you a 5 to 10 percent increase on ad engagement."

And so what if the trade we made for our valuable demographic info resulted in us getting 36 minutes a year of entertainment from Google Plus? Jokes on us, I guess.

But I am not (quite) that cynical. Google did not go through all that effort just to build something that people never use. Perhaps they did not dream of the massive destination site. Perhaps we dreamed that up ourselves because we wanted a real competitor for Facebook. But every sign from inside the company is that Google cares deeply about social and they are willing to risk their best product (Search) in order to integrate themselves into your social life. They want to win in social.

And you know, I think they can, but only by ditching the very idea that animates Google Plus.

Reuters

Essentially, Google built a social "spine" for their services without building a service that developed into a compelling social offering. There is no meat on the social bone because Google thought of building a social network not as a means for you to connect with friends but as a means for you to connect with Google.

In an earnings call with investors, CEO Larry Page laid out Google's approach to its social effort. "Google+ is about much more than the individual features themselves. It's also about building a meaningful relationship with users so that we can dramatically improve the services we offer," Page said. "Understanding who people are, what they care about, and the other people that matter to them is crucial if we are to give users what they need, when they need it."

Not that mission statements are the be all and end all, but notice how different Facebook's theory of the case is: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Facebook is about you sharing with the world. Google Plus is about Google understanding you. See the difference? This is why people sometimes say that Google doesn't get social. People don't join Facebook so Facebook can understand them better! In fact, the better Facebook understands them, the more wary of the service they get.

Here's the charitable way of looking at things: Google Plus was the first step. Now that they've got the spine in place, they can use their knowledge of the social web to build cool integrations with their existing products. For example, I think the Circles integration with Gmail is awesome. Try it yourself: stick your family members into a Circle. Then, open up Gmail, and click on the Family circle. Voila: every email a family member has sent you is right there. This is awesome. And you can see how Google Plus could form a social dashboard for the email experience. I'd expect to see a lot more of that kind of thing across Google's services.

But.

That's not the kind of thing that's going to get people to spend more time with Google's social offerings. You create the circle, move the people, and you're gone. It's a nice utility but it's not what has made any social network work so far. Let's assume Google wants people to post to and spend time on G+. How can they go to the next level? How can they make it easier for people to connect to and share with people they care about?

I think Google needs to stop looking across town at Facebook and look within itself. Google is riddled with invisible social networks surrounding a wide range of products. Even better, Google's homegrown social networks tend to be built around Google's core strength: organized (and organizing) information.

* * *

Reuters

I've been drawing out a city building metaphor here, so let's keep it going. If Google Plus is California City (or Brasilia), Google needs to find areas where people are already congregating excitedly. They shouldn't build a new city, but revitalize the neighborhoods they already have.

Note that this community building task is different from providing better search service with social knowledge! This is about generating more social connections, not drawing on them to power a separate product. The former is nice, but it's not how you build an engaged community.

So, where are the neighborhoods where humans are already hanging out? Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly "social networks" could easily be thought of as places that help people "share," a la Facebook's mantra. Just think about them all: Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. Hell, even Zagat.

It's these already bustling communities that should form the core of Google's next-level social offering. Take Scholar, which allows users to access research papers. A smallish group numbering in the millions visit the site to find research papers because it works better than academic search engines. It's pretty clear that Google's corporate honchos think the site is kind of a drag and they have no revenue model for it. Little has been done to update the service, even simple things like allowing people to sort by the number of citations.

But think about Scholar as a latent social network. Each paper contains its own social network that Google already crawls. Every bibliography is filled with other social networks. And people searching Google Scholar are likely to be as interested in connecting with the researchers who created those papers as they are with the papers themselves. Why isn't Google making it easy to connect the searchers with the searched? And sure, build a whole other set of social tools on top of that, which make it easy to share with networks of researchers. You want every college kid in America to start engaging deeply with your social network? Make it easy for them to get their papers written.

Or take Google Books, which has been languishing thanks to a similar level of inattention. Every book is also a latent social community. Why can't I lay down markers on my favorite books so that when someone stumbles on some old and forgotten energy book, they see my face there and can connect with me as someone who cares about this obscure thing that they care about? Boom: Instant, fairly strong tie social connection.

I'm just spitballing here. There are so many other things that Google could do with its existing products by working with the communities who already engage around them.

Instead, Google has tended to ignore or piss off its passionate social fans. (That's not to mention the many small, revenueless products -- Wave, Buzz, Knol, etc -- that had their own small but dedicated communities.) So, Google squashed Reader's biggest fans when they decided to integrate that service into Google Plus. The nuts and bolts of the change ruined Reader as a social network for sophisticated sharers of information. Were tons of people using it? No, but they loved it with the kind of passion that few have for Google Plus. Facebook would have tested to see if the changes hurt how often people used the site; I'm not so sure that Google did.

I can see why this is not the most obvious strategy for a company of Google's size: "Build social tools specific to our dozens of products? Bah! Why don't we just come up with a single set and push them out?"

It doesn't seem like Google groks how to create the smaller, self-organized networks of people who become the main driving force behind the larger thing. How many thousands of Twitter users power the whole service? How many thousands of Reddit users drive the whole news system? It I'm sure Google's executives understand the 90-9-1 rule intellectually, which says that 1 percent of users tend to contribute the most to social networks. But they don't get how to identify those key users.

Most companies have to create those kinds of users, but Google just has them sitting around in droves. It's those people rooting around in Scholar and Books and Earth. It's those people uploading ridiculous amounts of photos to Picasa. It's those people who built large networks of Google Reader friends. They are the ones who make a social network awesome and therefore worth visiting.

So, yes, use Google Plus as the social spine. Satisfy the corporate imperative to "understand" me and my web of connections. But now Google should concentrate on fostering the nascent but largely invisible communities it already has. Build them the tools they what they want to help them share. Don't mess up the networks they put in place. Watch what they're doing and double down on helping other people find it.

Does that sound harder than just building one set of social tools that span the Google universe and waiting for the people to show up? Yes, yes it does. But it's an illusion that it's easy to build any social network. Discovering a hive of people spending time together online is an amazing and precious thing. You can't just put a street sign at a road in the middle of nowhere and expect a party to erupt.

So, Google, look inside your already sprawling Google City. Find your explicit and implicit social power users, then empower them to build your social network.

The Future of Scholarship: Easier, Harder, and With More Charlatans

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Tue, 29 May 2012 03:18:00 PDT

The shift from paper to the tools of a simple laptop has brought about a new age of research, and it's mostly good news for readers and writers alike.

Einstein's desk compared with a more modern one. (AP/James and Winnie via Flickr)

With the academic year now safely concluded, I have the summer months to pursue a writer's life. I've signed on to write a "biography" of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer for this Princeton University Press series, and right now I'm about 30,000 words in. Lately, when I sit down in the morning to get started on my labors for the day, I've found myself thinking about how the work of writing has changed for me since I wrote my first book, some fifteen years ago. I was using an Apple laptop then -- a PowerBook 100, which I had bought at about the time it was discontinued and then used for five or six years -- and I'm using an Apple laptop now. I relied on a range of scholarly, critical, and literary sources then, and I do so now. But at this point the similarities pretty much end. And the new world of research may be taking us down some highly promising paths.

Fifteen years ago my laptop was surrounded by books, some of which I owned, some I had checked out from my college's library or from the local public library, some I had ordered from other libraries. And then there were the photocopied articles, so many that I had organized them roughly by subject and gathered them into three-ring binders. So my large desk was covered with open books and binders, overlapping, stacked, some propped open by others. Maybe one corner of the laptop would be used to hold a book open, at the cost of an unstable keyboard. If the laptop was plugged into the college network, I might have had Pine open for email -- though I didn't get many emails -- and telnet for checking library catalogs. Other than that, it was MS Word 5.1 all the time.

Now I still have books around, but in far smaller stacks, and no photocopies at all. Instead, I have thirty or more browser tabs open, containing articles from JSTOR or Project Muse, full-length texts on Google Books and Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com pages containing all the notes I've made in the Kindle books I've used for research, plus a number of "Look Inside!" pages from Amazon. I even have Amazon pages open for books sitting on my desk. There's no Kindle edition of Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial biography of Thomas Cranmer, but if I'm looking for a particular passage in it, looking through my underlined and annotated paper copy is just too slow: I type a keyword or two into the "Look Inside" search box and get the relevant page number instantly. Often I type in a quotation from the webpage instead of from the book because it's faster and easier than trying to find a way to prop the book open. Probably half of the sources I draw on in my research are still from print, but I spend 80 percent or more of my working time looking at my laptop screen. I still use a lot of books, but I spend less and less time in them, and more and more time with digital text (even when I have hard copies of the books).

(Oh, and instead of using MS Word or any other word processor I write in a text editor using Markdown syntax. Everything I write is in plain text until I'm ready to send it to the publisher, at which point I reluctantly open a word processing app.)

So how do these changes matter? How do they affect the work of writing, and how we think about the work of writing? I think there are three major ways.

1) They make research -- and getting the research into my documents -- much easier and faster. Obviously.

2) They make it less defensible to cut corners. If I read in a modern book or article a quotation from an old book or article, chances are I can find that original source online: if it's a book, it's likely to be in Google Books or some other site, and if it's an article, the digital archives of periodicals are increasingly complete. There's really no good excuse for failing to track down that original source to make sure it hasn't been quoted inaccurately or out of context, and to see if it contains other useful material.

3) They make it easier to fake erudition. It has never been nearly so easy to give yourself the appearance of learning you do not really have. Though I still have to -- or rather, get to! -- travel to archives to study unique documents, anywhere I have an internet connection I also have access to a vast range of materials that once were available only to people who used the largest libraries in the world. A wide range of sites help me with translations of texts written in languages that I don't know well or don't know at all: if I have even minimal knowledge of a language I can easily cite a source in the original language, from an authoritative text, which would make me seen a hell of a lot more scholarly than I am. (Not that I would ever do something like that.) Instead of citing one source for a given idea I can cite five. If I have gotten information from a commonly-used source I can often track down a much older and more obscure citation for it.

All this may be significant for the future of writing based on published-source research. For a very long time, certain kinds of scholarly and intellectual work could be done only by a handful of people, people with regular access to great libraries and the time to spend sifting through them. The value of their work stemmed in part from the scarcity of both resources and opportunities. In some cases, scholars who didn't make very good arguments or write very clearly still because widely respected because of the heavy lifting they had done in libraries and archives.

It's at least possible that in this new knowledge environment we'll be able to take more of the research as a given -- not all of it, but more of it -- and will demand from researchers some of the literary virtues: lucidity of style, subtlety of argument, liveliness of narrative. Maybe when readers will make it clear that they know how easy it is to multiply sources, writers will cease to try to impress through numbers of footnotes.

George Augustus Auden with his sons, with W.H. at the far left. (Family Ghosts)

And maybe, for those born researchers, the lure of the archive will become stronger. Last year, when I was doing some research on the poet W. H. Auden at the magnificent Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I was given the chance to look through some uncatalogued materials. There I found a series of letters Auden's father, George Augustus Auden, had written when he was serving as an British Army doctor in World War I, at Gallipoli. It was fascinating to see how this middle-aged doctor was transformed into a fighting man, came to identify over time more and more with the soldiers. I found myself wanting to put aside what I was working on and write something about the remarkable Dr. Auden. I forced myself to overcome the temptation, but those letters are still there at the Berg Collection, waiting for me or some other researcher to show up, study them, make sense of them, tell the world about them. And there is far, far more such fascinating but unpublished material in the world's libraries and archives than most people suspect.

So when I think about the future of research in a thoroughly connected age, what I see, primarily, is opportunity. If scholars are encouraged to write more clearly, to find better stories to tell, to stop showing off, to dig deeper into unpublished material, then readers and writers alike have some good times ahead.

Skulls, Lasers, and 3D Imaging Bring the Dead to Life

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Tue, 29 May 2012 01:56:00 PDT

Experts at the Smithsonian are using 3D scans of artifacts, like this 19th-century explorer's skull, to recreate the past. Robert Kennicott, a naturalist and early contributor to the Smithsonian collections, died mysteriously on an expedition in 1866. When forensic anthropologists from the National Museum of Natural History exhumed him in 2001 to determine his cause of death, however, they discovered evidence that pointed to natural causes. They were also left with a good looking human skull on their hands -- an ideal item for Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo (aka the "laser cowboys" of the Smithsonian's 3D digitization team) to scan. With a digital scan and replica of the skull, a sculptor recreated Kennicott's face.

This short documentary was produced by Ryan Reed for Smithsonian magazine, which has an article on how these laser scanning techniques are contributing to paleontology here. Below, compare a photograph of Kennicott, courtesy of Wikipedia, with the final sculpture, in a still from the film:

For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine, visit the YouTube channel.

The Fake Magazines Used in Blade Runner Are Still Futuristic, Awesome

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Tue, 29 May 2012 00:08:00 PDT

Beautiful and cool magazines purportedly from the movie Blade Runner are circling the Internet. But are they real?

A science-fiction Tumblr recently unearthed some magazine covers that purportedly appear on a rack in the background of the classic film Blade Runner. You can see four more at the original site.

I couldn't think of the moment in the film when they might have appeared and I didn't have the film on hand to confirm, so I did some Googling around to see what I could find about their provenance. I want to lead you through that journey, only because it's kind of weird and fun.

Basic Googling various combinations of Blade Runner and magazines with some other keywords yielded nothing. So, I took the image of Dorgon Magazine and ran it through Google Images to see if it had shown up anywhere else with more information attached. It had indeed been posted a few times around the web including at a site for Manahan Design, where they were presented as custom Kindle screensavers for jailbroken devices. But down at the bottom of that site, there was a little inscription: "Much credit goes to Kevin From the Propsummit forums for his amazingly made high-res reproductions of the magazine covers seen in various locations in Blade Runner," we read.

Who is this mysterious, Kevin? And what is Propsummit? And are these covers actually *recreations* by someone who looked at the magazines in the film and somehow designed from anew from scratch? Are these completely new design fiction objects modeled on old design fiction objects for a movie that came out 30 years ago?

At first, it seemed like the answer was yes. Kevin, who provides no other information about himself, posted this image and commentary to the Propsummit Blade Runner fan forum.

The text is all new, clean and original. So too is the marker pen colouring and the pointy hand. I had to redraw the Dorgon lettering by hand. It is similar to a lot of fonts, but not the same.

I have spent hours (I'm not kidding) trawling through clip art libraries trying to find the original pictures.

If anyone can help me out with finding these images I shall be very grateful.

I am particularly keen to find this one because we have clear provenance for it being used on the set along with Droid and Kill.

He also posted a pretty clear screen grab of the spot where you can see Dorgon.

At this point, I am starting to feel the thrill of the chase. These covers are bouncing around the Internet right now (at Gawker's io9, etc) and now it may be that they are fakes, but not in a bad way. The idea that some guy out there saw the movie and painstakingly recreated them with the vintage clipart that the original designer used is mindblowing! I mean: the Internet! Borges! The flip flop!

If you're not familiar with that last term, it's a concept that ex-Twitter media creator and novelist Robin Sloan came up. His definition: "the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again--maybe more than once."

In this case, clip art from a computer in the early 1980s was used to make magazine covers that were printed and then filmed in a classic movie. These things were forgotten for decades until sometime during or shortly before 2009, someone (Kevin) started to reconstruct them for his friends in an Internet forum about the movie. Some forumgoer used them as a Kindle screensaver; another was going to print them out and frame them, according to a forum posting.

"I need to talk to this Kevin!" I thought. Unfortunately, I had to join the forum in order to send him a message and an administrator has to approve my request (I'm still waiting). So, to kill time, I started peering at the two covers.

And I notice: these aren't quite the same. The typeface on "Dealing with Ram!" is different. The highlighting has harder edges. The "Magazine" in the Dorgon header is thinner and sharper. And most obviously: in the bottom right corner, there is *too much* of the text exposed.

I become convinced: whatever the images bouncing around the Internet are, they are not these covers that Kevin from Propsummit has painstakingly, brilliantly reconstructed. That was just a diversion! (Albeit an awesome one.)

So where did the other cover come from? I decide to stick with searches related to Dorgon because it is a unique search string. "Blade Runner magazines" is a terrible search. "Dorgon Magazine" on the other hand, yields gold. (And, honestly, I probably should have started my search off this way, though I'm glad that I didn't.)

The very first hit for "Dorgon Magazine" is a flickr set by Simon Woodside in which he reveals that these covers appear in a Blade Runner bonus feature, "Signs of the Times: Graphic Design."

Furthermore, he writes, "The covers were created by production illustrator Tom Southwell in1980-1981 and appeared in the background on a magazine stand in thecity streets." Southwell, it turns out, is still working in Hollywood. His most recent work is as a production designer for an Elmore Leonard adaptation, Freaky Deaky, which debuted this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. (And that is directed by Walter Mathau's son.)

So, there you have it. The covers are real. Their creator is still alive and working. And some guy named Kevin has done something almost unbelievable for a small set of Blade Runner fans at an Internet forum devoted to the movie.

Oh, and before you get any ideas, I already registered DorgonMagazine.com. Just wanted to save you the trip.

Via @Pbump

A Guide to San Francisco in 1937, When the Golden Gate Bridge Opened

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 22:16:00 PDT

As the Golden Gate Bridge neared completion, a select group of people were invited to a "Last Rivet" ceremony on the actual floor of the bridge. Among them were three little girls dressed up to represent China, Canada, and Mexico. The trio held large bouquets and posed for a photo next to a man in a dark suit and hat, who glances out of the frame.

For me, these people have become a visual representation for the historian's idea that we should think of the past as a foreign country. There's something familiar but strange about a "last rivet" ceremony that includes having little girls dress up in outfits from their homelands. I almost recognize the man's style, but its nuances -- like that boutineer -- elude me.

Looking at the photo, taken at a spot I've undoubtedly walked by, I realize that I do not understand the San Francisco of 1937. Not only do I not know the details of what motivated its people, I don't even know the basics, like where I'd go for a haircut or a drive or a suit.

And to be honest, despite the historian's axiom, few historical works ground us in the kinds of details we'd want to know about a foreign country. If you were headed to Madrid, you would almost certainly purchase a guidebook. And inside that guide book, you'd find a list of places to see, bars, shopping, hotels, etc. Yet when we visit the past, we're never given that map of everyday life.

Luckily, because of all the hoopla around the Golden Gate's opening, we have something strangely close to a guide book. It's the "Official Souvenir Program for the Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta," which began precisely 75 years ago today. Inside it, you find a bunch of high-fallutin' rhetoric about Progress and Commerce, but you also find more than 130 advertisements for various businesses that wanted to be included in what functioned as a visitor's guidebook.

The only problem is that the old guidebook as it was constituted didn't really have a good user interface. So, Philip Bump and I made you one. We (painstakingly) extracted the individual ads, transcribed their addresses, and then Philip coded them all onto a Google Map with icons (designed by Nicolas Mollet) to designate particular types of businesses.

When you click on an icon, the advertisement of the business that was located there will pop up. Most are simple, but many will really give you a flavor of the time and place and also where you could get a good tamale over there in Oakland. There's a full-screen version hosted here.

There are several things to look for on this map that may be of interest to you. First, I think it's fun to scan the map for microneighborhoods like the one up and down Polk St. Second, notice the regional nature of the map. This isn't just San Francisco establishments because the catalog was really for local or national tourists. There were even more outlying establishments but few offered addresses that we could locate. Third, my favorite thing may be the come on's that the bars offered. While O'Connors Taverns went with the simple tagline, "Cocktails Served to Suit You," other drinking establishments had bigger ideas. Cinnabar in Burlingame was the "The Brightest * on the Peninsula." The Rancho on Polk was "TOPS in Drinks and Sociability." And most intriguingly, Mona's on Columbus was "A Rendezvous for Discerning Bohemians."

One fascinating coda is that Mona's is actually quite a famous place in San Francisco's old-school queer community. First at 451 Union Street and then at 140 Columbus (as on our map), and finally at 440 Broadway, Mona's was a freethinking, freewheeling, mostly lesbian bar at a time when that sort of thing was not easy to find. A young bohemian named Mona Hood ran the place and provided a venue for crossdressing entertainers from about 4pm to 2am every night. Mona's is considered a key link in the chain of events that made San Francisco's the queer capital of America: it was a space where lesbians, and other people in the queer community, could live their lives out in the open. (For more on that story, check out San Francisco State University professor Nan Alamilla Boyd's Wide Open Town.")

Meanwhile 140 Columbus remains a meaningful space in its own right. After Mona's moved on, the cellar bar was reinvented as The Purple Onion, a performance space that has played host to performers like Woody Allen and Richard Pryor to poets like Maya Angelou.

That's just one of the many stories embedded on the map above. Go take a look for yourself; the map's just the beginning of your trip back to San Francisco, 1937.

Success! The International Space Station Grabs the SpaceX Dragon

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 20:51:00 PDT

"Looks like we caught a Dragon by the tail," said NASA astronaut Don Pettit.

NASA

Three days, six hours, 11 minutes, and 23 seconds after launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the privately-funded spacecraft Dragon was successfully captured by the robotic arm of the International Space Station as it orbited the Earth 251 miles over northwest Australia, NASA said. Dragon is now the first private spacecraft to dock at the International Space Station. Docking was considered to be the most challenging aspect of Dragon's mission.

Below, the dramatic moment as it unfolded over Twitter.

.@SpaceX #Dragon resumes approach to #ISS toward 30m hold point. Based on lighting, grapple estimated 10:40amET. Live.: nasa.gov/ntv
-- NASA (@NASA) May 25, 2012

#Dragon holding at 30 meters
-- SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2012

@SpaceX #Dragon approaches 10 meter capture point hold from #ISS. #Exp31 waiting to grapple. go.usa.gov/0CY twitter.com/NASA_Johnson/s...
-- Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 25, 2012

MCC gives #Exp31 @astro_Pettit go to grapple @SpaceX #Dragon. @astro_andre assisting inside #ISS cupola. go.usa.gov/0CY
-- Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 25, 2012

#Dragon is go for capture!
-- SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2012

The station's robotic arm is heading towards #Dragon.
-- SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2012

CAPTURE COMPLETE!!!
-- SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2012

"Looks like we caught a Dragon by the tail." - Astronaut Don Pettit after capturing @SpaceX Dragon capsule with ISS robotic arm.
-- NASA Kennedy / KSC (@NASAKennedy) May 25, 2012

Dragon will stay at the Space Station until the end of May.

The Unsolved Mysteries of Tornado Formation

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 19:49:00 PDT

In this short NASA documentary, storm researcher Tim Samaras describes how satellite imaging can help predict tornadoes. Because it's unclear exactly how various weather conditions come together to catalyze a tornado, it's hard to predict them more than 15 minutes in advance, Samaras says. He's hoping that the NOAA and NASA's GOES-R satellites will help change that.

For more documentaries from NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/.

In the Last Month, Microsoft Sent Google 500,000 Takedown Requests

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 18:06:00 PDT

Here is what one effect of copyright law looks like online:

That's the little notice that appears at the bottom of the first page of Google's search resultsfor the phrase "microsoft office free download." If you keep paging through Google's results, by page 20 or so you'll have just as many notices of content removal as you will have actual content. That's because these links pointed to illegal copies of Microsoft's proprietary software, which Microsoft requested be removed from Google Search.

Just how many requests Google receives to remove links from its search results is detailed in the company's new report, and the numbers are staggering. Google says that it is no longer unusual to receive more than 250,000 take-down requests in a single week -- more requests than it received in all of 2009. In the past month alone, copyright owners and the companies that represent them made 1.2 million requests to delete a result from Search.

By far the copyright owner with the biggest, most aggressive anti-copyright-infringement arm is Microsoft, which has notified Google of more than half a million URLs containing pirated Microsoft content in the past month. Of the million of requests Google received, the majority come from just a handful of reporting organizations -- roughly 20, according to Fred von Lohmann, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel. Because of the increasing volume, Google has a growing team of staff devoted to handling requests and deleting the offending search results. It's a "pretty serious resource commitment," said von Lohmann. Parts of the process are automated -- as any process dealing with that volume of tasks would need to be -- but von Lohmann says that humans do ensure that the requests aren't in error and that the content is actually in violation of a copyright.

Copyright owners and the companies that represent them used to alert Google to copyright infringement via email, fax, snail mail -- you name it. Last year, Google introduced a web form that streamlined the requests and made it easier and faster for Google to delete the URLs (Google says the average turnaround time is less than 11 hours). The web form has certainly led to the steep uptick in request, but companies are also policing more aggressively. According to von Lohmann, "One of the principal factors is that copyright owners . . . are getting increasingly sophisticated" at using technology to crawl the web for their proprietary material -- though not everyone who finds their content online illegally requests that Google remove the link from Search, instead they may go to the site directly and get the content removed. In that case, they sometimes prefer to have the link remain in Search -- a dead link that goes to nothing and frustrates people looking for the violating material.

At the heart of the report is a very Google sort of idea that better data will beget well-informed policies. "Obviously we know that there are policy makers in the United States and around the world that are considering how copyright laws should be changed for the digital age," says von Lohmann. Google wants "to make sure that those policy makers and the public have real-world data as they make decisions."

What It Means That Computers Can Tell These Smiles Apart, But You Can't

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 16:17:00 PDT

Computer algorithms can now discern the meaning behind humans' facial expressions.

Image via Mohammed Hoque, Daniel McDuff, and Rosalind Picard.

The four people above are taking part in a clinical experiment. In the screenshots shown here, each guy is smiling once out of delight (reacting to a picture of an adorable baby) and once out of frustration: made to complete an online form that keeps malfunctioning. Awww vs. argh: same general expression, totally different emotion.

So which is which? Who's smiling out of joy, who out of annoyance?

If you're not totally sure, you're not alone. We humans need context and narrative to be able to discern the meanings of our fellow humans' facial expressions. We're sensitive to subtleties. That's one thing that makes us different from machines.

Except ... when it's not. In a paper just published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Mohammed Hoque, Daniel McDuff, and Rosalind Picard share a system that allows computers to become as sensitive as -- and, in fact, even more sensitive than -- humans.

The team, members of MIT's Affective Computing Group, combined two insights to arrive at their algorithm. First, genuine smiles tend to build slowly and linger, while frustrated smiles tend to appear and disappear quickly. Second, the musculature of fake smiles tends to differ from that of genuine ones: hence "thin" smiles, "stiff" smiles, etc.

Those types of smiles are often involuntary. When Hoque and his colleagues asked study participants to feign frustration, 90 percent of them did so without smiling. But when the researchers presented their subjects with a task that caused genuine frustration -- filling out an online form, only to find their information deleted after they pressed the "submit" button -- 90 percent of them ended up smiling. Frustratedly.

The algorithm Hoque and his colleagues developed accounts for that expressive difference. And it does so quite effectively. The team's computer-based system was able to figure out which smiles were fake 92 percent of the time. The success rate for humans who were asked to do the same: 50 percent, which is obviously the same as if they had randomly guessed.

The most immediate and obvious application of the team's findings would be to aid people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Emotion-reading computer programs could help the autistic to assess and interpret other people's facial expressions -- one of the biggest impediments to social interaction.

But what about the broader implications? First, a hope ... then, a caveat.

On the one hand, as the paper puts it, the team's findings could be used "to develop automated systems that recognize spontaneous expressions with accuracy higher than the human counterpart." Facial recognition is now a fairly common technology, used in everything from Facebook to city streets. Emotion recognition is the next logical step in that progression -- a field that could bring a whole new meaning to "sentiment analysis."

Emotion-analyzing computers may mean that, soon, the line that divides "human" from "machine" could become just a little bit thinner. When machines can understand people's weird, expressive subtleties -- the little tics and tricks that give us so much of our expressive uniqueness -- the "IRL interaction > digital interaction" argument loses just a bit of its traction. At the moment, services like Skype and FaceTime and Google+ Hangouts are valuable not just because they help us to communicate across geographic divides, but also because they help us to communicate across semantic divides. They replace LOLs and emoji with laughter and faces. Compared to their text-based alternatives, they allow for communication that is, in every sense, more meaningful.

So computers empowered with emotion-reading abilities could -- could -- have implications for communicating, for marketing, for the way we think about machines in the first place. That's the hope.

And here's the caveat: Consider how narrow the MIT study actually is in the task it's asking of machines. Computers outperformed humans in this one specific task of emotional identification. What happens, though, when more layers of complexity -- more faces, more types of smiles, more situations -- are added to the mix? Humans would once again outperform the computers. The beauty and the downfall of algorithms is their narrowness: they're wonderfully systematized and horribly adaptable. Deep Blue may beat you at chess; challenge it to Candy Land, though, and victory will be yours.

One goal of the Affective Computing Group's general research, Hoque points out, is to "make a computer that's more intelligent and respectful." And while today's paper points out how achieving that goal may be possible, it also highlights how crazily incremental the progress toward it will have to be. The MIT team has developed a system that can tell the difference between frustrated smiles and joyful ones in a given set of circumstances. That's remarkable. But to create computers that can just read emotions, as a general, human-like thing, they'll have to delineate a huge array of mental states as expressed through a huge array of human faces. They'll have to parse the connections among those emotions.

And that's no small task. Creating "automated systems that recognize spontaneous expressions with accuracy higher than the human counterpart" will be incredibly hard. We humans, after all, are not known for our lack of complexity. So while emo-computers may be possible, they are also many painstaking steps away. For now, for better or for worse, humans are still the best judges of humankind.

For the image at top, (a), (d), (f), and (h) depict instances of frustration; (b), (c), (e), and (g) depict instances of delight. For what it's worth, your correspondent got 3 of the 4 of these wrong.

Picture of the Day: The Bright, Burning Sun

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:31:00 PDT

The good people of NASA have taken images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and manipulated them to give us this cool, strange view of activity on the sun captured last fall. While there is no particular scientific benefit to the additional processing, NASA says, the picture's black background provides a good contrast for a very clear -- and very beautiful -- display of the golden loops of plasma.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: NASA.

Life (as Told by 873 Stock Photos)

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 13:31:00 PDT

Stock photos are notable mostly for their weirdness and second-mostly for their blandness. They exist to capture, in the most benign and/or striking and/or hilarious way possible, the most universal features of life: love, adventure, joy, heartbreak, sickness, stress. Their depictions are often trivial. They are often trite. And that is the point.

The thing with cliche, though, is that it can be pretty powerful when it's made collective. In an ad for its services, Getty Images gathered 873 different depictions of life's stock-friendliest scenes: weddings, births, sunlit walks, stormy skies. It joined those images into a video that speeds along at fifteen stocktastic shots per second.

I've now watched the thing four times, and still can't see it without getting chills.

It's a nice metaphor: Take a bunch of commonplace moments. Join them together. And get something amazing.

Via @interactivate

How the Golden Gate Bridge Was Built

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 11:44:00 PDT

A celebratory history of one of the world's most famous structures

Even at 75 years old, the Golden Gate Bridge remains one of the most striking structures in the world. And not just for its beauty, but for what its beauty reminds us of: persistence and accomplishment. Man working on nature, and vice versa. Metal and sea and mountain and fog, orange and green and white and blue, unified into a single vision. The Golden Gate, both despite and because of its age, is still one of the best examples we have of "the technological sublime."

The video above, detailing the step-by-step construction of the bridge, is a reminder that even the building of the Golden Gate featured elements of the sublime. The construction teams started their work on the peninsulas, building out over the wind-whipped waters of the San Francisco Bay. With labor and 70,000 tons of steel, they built arms that reached out to each other over the straits, getting closer by the day.

Given the strait's precarious mixture of violent winds, swirling currents, and thick fogs, many thought such a bridge couldn't be built. Many others simply opposed its building for aesthetic and economic reasons. "While a bridge was an obvious need, it was not an obvious possibility," the video notes.

But the bridge, as bridges tend to do, won out. On November 18, 1936, the structure's arms met in the middle of the Golden Gate. And on May 27 of the next year, the bridge opened for business -- its completion and its charisma, the video declares, proving that "all men are builders at heart."

Video courtesy the Prelinger Archives via Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg.

Picture of the Day: The Mars Horizon

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 10:26:00 PDT

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity captured this image looking eastward over the Endeavour Crater late in the afternoon of Opportunity's 2,888th Martian sol (day) which corresponded with March 9, 2012 here on Earth. In the foreground, Opportunity's own shadow appears, in a sort of one-step-removed self-portrait. The Endeavour Crater where Opportunity spent the winter months spans 14 miles in diameter, roughly the same area as Seattle. The image is a mosaic of about a dozen images and presented in false color to draw out certain features of the topography.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: Reuters.

Take a Tour Around the Telescope Array Where We're Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 09:09:00 PDT

An interactive panoramic view of the place where scientists are hoping to make the first human contact with alien life

"When we get evidence of intelligent life out there, it's going to come through Hat Creek. That's going to be the place, " says Ron Barrett of Alameda, California, the photographer behind this interactive panoramic of the Allen Telescope Array. The 42 radio telescopes are pointed at the skies over the town of Hat Creek in northern California.

Barrett visited Hat Creek in January at the invitation of Jill Tarter, the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research who announced her retirement earlier this week. When Barrett arrived at the site, all of the radio-telescope dishes were pointed down for maintenance. Barrett asked for them to rotate for the pictures and, "It was like being God. All of the sudden all of these things were pointed to the sky," Barrett says. During Barrett's tour of the site, Gerry Harp -- who is to succeed Tarter -- told him he believed that a signal from intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy could come "at any time" now, and that with new evidence from NASA's Kepler mission to find habitable planets, they were able to better train the telescopes on promising sites in the galaxy. Barrett recalls, "I said to him, we're up here alone, just the two of us. But when you get that signal, this place is going to be inundated with people, selling t-shirts and checking it out. This place is destined to be a national shrine."

To make the image, Barrett shot some 340 separate photographs with his camera on a special tripod mount that allows him to make precise incremental adjustments to the camera's position.

Play around with the shot, expand it to the full screen, and be sure to point it to the skies. Think about this remote outpost of human civilization in the hills of northern California, and that first contact it may one day make. "It would probably be one of the most Earth-shaking developments in the history of mankind," says Barrett. "And it's going to happen. We're right on the cusp of it."

Thanks to Ross Andersen for the tip. Ron Barrett can be reached here.

The Color, Romance, and Impact of the Golden Gate at 75

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 07:34:00 PDT

Everything you've always wanted to know about the Golden Gate Bridge but never had an eminent scholar around to ask.

Library of Congress.

The Golden Gate Bridge -- one of the world's most celebrated and instantly recognizable icons -- turns 75 today. Tonight the bridge will be closed for a fireworks display signaling the climax of a remarkable yearlong extravaganza of events, exhibitions, and media coverage marking the anniversary of the spanning of the Golden Gate.

John King, the San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic, has been writing about the significance of the bridge as infrastructure, symbol, and inspiration for a bold spirit of improvement that is almost impossible to replicate today, when California's bid for a high-speed rail link is under attack from all quarters. This weekend he spoke at the California Historical Society, which painted its headquarters international orange, the color of the bridge, for the occasion of an exhibit that runs through October and publication of a free interactive e-book entitled "A Wild Flight of the Imagination: The Story of the Golden Gate Bridge." Anthea Hartig, the society's executive director, joined King in a conversation about the Golden Gate Bridge with me.

Jon Christensen: The Golden Gate is now indelibly defined by this beautiful bridge. But why did the Golden Gate need a bridge in the first place?

John King: Part of it was very basic. The automobile was picking up popularity, and by all accounts you had two-to-three-hour waits to get across the gate on a Sunday night by car ferry. Beyond that was the business, cultural, and even manifest destiny of the dream of opening up the Redwood Empire, north of the city, and connecting everything from Buenos Aires to the Arctic, through San Francisco.

Anthea Hartig: The romance of the new automobiles came into play. But I also think it was the power of the idea to span this majestic, complicated narrow strait. There was something very contagious in that, especially in the Progressive Era. Man could fix things and make the world better in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I. These progressive ideas were very powerful in California.

The Golden Gate at sunset. Before the bridge, obviously. (Online Archive of California).

Jon Christensen: Some people argued that the Golden Gate didn't need a bridge. Do you have any sympathy for their arguments?

Hartig: I do. Seeing Ansel Adams' photographs and the beauty of the gate before the bridge, I can see that. It was one of California's natural glories. Do you, John?

King: Not really. Call me old-fashioned, but the notion that a place should be frozen in time and be the same as when you first encountered it is quite romantic but not necessarily a way to build a region. There's a certain glory and accomplishment in the bridge.

Christensen: What's your own personal favorite Golden Gate Bridge story?

Hartig: My first time crossing the bridge was after graduating from high school. We rented a wreck from Rent-a-Wreck. It was a Maverick and we drove all around the Bay Area. For inland Los Angeles girls it was the best time. Crossing the bridge, wherever you are from in California, it's your bridge. And it's like being on a bridge in the sky. There are stunning bridges in downtown L.A., crossing the Los Angeles River. But I had never been that close to flying. The sky, the water, the color -- the bridge is truly an amazing piece of architecture.

King: I'm an East Bay boy. I took the bridge for granted. I don't have any transcendent moment. But what struck me most was going to Fort Point last year and being down there under the bridge and being overwhelmed by the immensity of the achievement. You're down there on this weird little spit of land next to a fort from the 1850s, and this enormous graceful thing lunges past you into the ocean.

Jon Christensen: The building of the bridge and the opening celebration -- a "Golden Gate Fiesta" -- 75 years ago was filled with symbolism.

King: There was this very strong cultural symbolism. There was a practical need for the bridge, but also a desire to say we're going to show everyone by doing this that we are the city of the Pacific. We are better than Los Angeles. I quoted an editorial from the San Francisco Call-Bulletin in a recent story that said, "We are breaking down our walls, we are building a mightier city than you have ever seen ... the happiest, bravest and most prosperous city in the world."

Hartig: Wow. That's such a great mash-up of the American dream, the Declaration of Independence, and the national anthem, the home of the brave. I've come to see the bridge as a series of moments of remarkable bravery, chutzpah, and hubris. Man over nature, the great crown of the gateway, and the great crown of imperialism after the closing of the American frontier. We are looking to the Pacific. And we are putting a crown at the edge of the continent.

Christensen: The Golden Gate is the symbol of San Francisco now on everything from hoodies to hotdog stands. Before it was built, what would have gone on a San Francisco postcard?

King: Union Square, maybe, other buildings, images that at a glance you'd have to ask, what makes this any different from Cincinnati?

Hartig: What would have gone on a postcard and did was the Golden Gate itself, sunset at the Golden Gate. It's the edge of the West. I can't tell you how many hundreds of postcards we have in our archives, some of which are in our e-book.

An ironworker at the base of the south tower (Reuters).

Christensen: The bridge is defined by its color more than any other piece of infrastructure that I can think of. How did they pick that color?

Hartig: The steel was made in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and came by sea through the Panama Canal. To protect it from the corrosive ocean air they used a sealant. So the steel arrived here at something close to that color. And it caught the eye of many people, especially bridge architect Irving Morrow. There was a very big public debate about the color. The Department of War wanted to paint the bridge black with yellow stripes. A lot of engineers wanted it to be gray, closer to the color of steel, the actual material, and to make it go away in the landscape. Others wanted the color to match the autumnal glow of the Marin headlands. There was a lot of poetry in getting the color right, the intensity and power that would capture the monumentality of the longest, tallest suspension bridge and accentuate the natural beauty of its context. The poetics really prevailed.

Christensen: What does it say about the Golden Gate Bridge that it incorporated a pedestrian walkway? How did that happen?

Hartig: It's not a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. And it's not a short walk. But at the time, I don't think people would have dared to build a bridge without a walkway because so many pedestrians would use it. It's sad that only our modern culture could think of erasing pedestrians out of our transportation networks.

A crowd crossing the bridge on opening day (Online Archive of California).

Christensen: History is full of unrealized possibilities. What is your favorite version of the bridge that didn't get built?

King: I think it would have been fun if the toll booths had been sleeker and cooler with guys wearing natty little uniforms in natty little toll booths. The problem is that these neat little toll booths in some designs were attached to overbearing, over-stylized buildings that would have been administrative offices, a museum, who knows what else. Now you've got a pretty junky administrative building there but it's so bland you don't notice it. If it had been a mock Mayan temple it would be hard to ignore.

Hartig: Actually, my favorites were the neo-Sumerian and neo-Mayan buildings that were contemplated. They were pretty jazzy. They spoke of the time. But in terms of where it ended up, I actually think the privileging of the structure itself, Eberson's towers, and Morrow's roadway matter most. The experience of the bridge should not be arriving in some grand procession up and through a Brandenburg Gate-like toll plaza, but crossing the bridge, and catching a view of it from somewhere in the city. Fortunately, the sheer cost prohibited some of the excesses that were contemplated.

A concept drawing for a much worse-looking bridge (San Francisco Public Library).

Christensen: Why do we no longer dream so big and boldly and build so beautifully when it comes to our transportation networks?

King: One answer is fairly prosaic: the process these days. Another is that between then and now American society made a lot of big mistakes in terms of big projects and infrastructure. Neighborhoods were torn down. Freeways were put where they should not be. When the Golden Gate Bridge was unfurled across the most glorious portal in America, it fueled demand for more. After the Embarcadero Freeway pushed its way between downtown San Francisco and the bay progress was made by tearing it down and making sure nothing like that ever happens again. The problem is you get to the point where the triumph is all in the stopping. Defensive action can make people feel good about thwarting things, but also chokes off innovative things that reshape the landscape in good ways. The problem with process is not just stopping things, it's also all the constituencies that have a say. If you look at the new east span of the Bay Bridge, you can fault the beginning of that tortured saga. They said, we want to build an icon. So they set out to build an icon. The mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of Oakland, and others all had their agendas. But no one was pushing a vision. And you can't just go out and build an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge became an icon because of the grand ambitions of the design. That's different from building an icon. I don't think icons can be planned.

Christensen: How did the bridge change not just the Golden Gate but the surrounding communities as well?

Hartig: It certainly changed Marin. You can draw a straight line from the completion of the bridge to suburbanization in the '60s. Marin wasn't a suburb of San Francisco when ferries ruled the bay. And you never would have had the need for the environmental activism that led to the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which was truly a herculean effort that we all benefit from today. I also wonder if San Francisco hadn't benefited from other New Deal federal funding, what would have happened. That meant money could be spent on street widening in the city. Sidewalks shrunk to make traffic work. San Francisco became completely connected to the region with the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and the Bay Bridge on the other -- all with federal funds. We don't think much about how streets were changed, but it was very dramatic. It ushered in a new way to understand the city. It became much harder to be a pedestrian, and easier to be in a car. And that tension is still playing out.

King: The Golden Gate Bridge definitely had an impact on suburbanizing East Marin and the environmental protection of West Marin, but the Bay Bridge had a more quantifiable impact on regional development. The Bay Bridge was more about dollars and cents, population growth. The Golden Gate Bridge was more aspirational.

An ad the Brookdale Lodge in Sonoma County placed around the opening of the bridge (Archive.org).

Christensen: The Golden Gate Bridge turns 75 today. Will the romance ever fade? What keeps the love alive?

King: Everyone who sees it for the first time falls in love with it, and whether they consciously think about it, beyond the wonder of the setting and the structure, is the wonder of the seeming effortlessness of it, and how could something like this be here and be so good.

Hartig: It's Grace Kelly in Rear Window. It's effortless, yes. It's elegant. It's both seductive and solid, and temporal but lasting. That imprint is why it's used so often on everything from horrible magnets to stunning works of art and it has so easily become an icon. Its grace and beauty lend itself to that. It won't go away. I don't think we'll ever do stuff like this anymore. It stands peerless.

King: It's so rare in our society that things are embraced en masse architecturally. This is not just a cool piece of '30s design, it's a living presence. I don't think it will ever grow old.

Hartig: Yes, that consensus is so rare. I don't think it's too much to say it elevates the Golden Gate Bridge to the status of the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, architecture so universally acknowledged to be special, it floats above time as well as floating above the water, in the sky.

Library of Congress.

Ayahanda PJ 7 Icons Meninggal Dunia

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 06:22:00 PDT

- Inalillahiwainailahirajiun. Telah berpulang kepangkuan yang maha kuasa, Gusti Reza Djohan (58), ayahanda salah satu personil 7 Icons, PJ pada pukul 17.15 di RSPAD Gatot Subroto. Menurut sang manajer, ayahanda PJ meninggal pada usia 58 tahun, setelah mendapat beberapa hari perawatan di rumah sakit tersebut.

"Inalillahiwainailahirajiun, Telah Berpulang ke rahmatullah Ayahanda dari PJ 7 Icons BpK Gusti Reza Djohan hari senin tgl 30 april Jam 17.15 pm dlm Usia 58 di RSPAD Gatot Subroto , Alamat rumah DUKA RSPAD Gatot Subroto," tulis Willy manajer 7 Icons lewat broadcat message (30/4).

Lebih lanjut, Willy menulis almarhum ayahanda PJ akan dikebumikan pada pukul 10.00 pagi di TPU Karet Bivak, Jakarta Selatan.

"Jenazah Besok dimakamin kurang lebih jam 10 pagi.. di pemakaman Karet Bivak ..," paparnya.

Segenap jajaran redaksi Kapanlagi.com® mengucapkan turut berduka cita yang sedalam-dalamnya. Semoga almarhum diterima di sisi-Nya dan keluarga yang ditinggalkan di berikan ketabahan. Amin. (kpl/buj/sjw)

Watch and Buy: Kickstarter Is the Hipster Home Shopping Network

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 06:02:00 PDT

How did the crowd funding platform become the shopping destination for things like artisanal wrapping paper and bras with built-in iPhone pockets?

People love to hate on home-shopping shows -- after all, who in their right mind tunes in to QVC to buy this John Lennon-inspired sterling-silver "Imagine" ring for two easy payments of $27.00? What kind of sad lonely person would do that? Yet these shows continue to exist, so presumably they make money. Presumably these vendors tap into a deep emotional need for connection and self-expression. Presumably these absurd products reflect the values and desires of a group of home shoppers -- old people who still own TVs, of course, not digitally savvy hipsters with good taste in stuff.

Browsing Kickstarter, however, it seems we have a new wave of aspiring entrepreneurs making a play for the aspirational clicks of the Internet's early adopters, tastemakers, and Twitterati. These consumers would never be caught dead buying kitsch from QVC, but they've poured millions of dollars into bespoke design objects and high tech accessories. But they're not passive consumers -- they're backers, funding fledgling creative ventures of all kinds. Because each Kickstarter project begins with a pitch video (already spoofed in Portlandia), surfing the site becomes a hybrid process of watching and shopping, essentially the same mechanism at work in home shopping television. The buy-in might be more rewarding, in the sense that one can participate in making a creative project happen, rather than simply purchasing a novelty item, but increasingly, the most-funded projects on Kickstarter are precisely those that pre-sell physical products (in the categories of games, design, and technology, according to The New York Times).

From aquariums made out of vintage iMacs to handcrafted bamboo sunglasses, the following projects read like a game of hipster bingo -- look for words like "sustainable," "custom," "handmade," "unique," and "iPhone." All are fully funded, meaning their creators have received the necessary funding to move forward with production.

Project: Coffee Joulies
What it is: Metal coffee beans (filled with a proprietary melting substance) that cool down hot coffee, and then keep it at the "right" temperature.
Money quote: "It started with a problem I think everyone has experienced: coffee isn't always the right temperature."
Funding raised: $306,944
What it costs: $40

Project: TikTok and LunaTik
What it is: A wristband that turns an iPod Nano into a multi-touch watch.
Money quote: "We wanted to create a product that your friends and strangers would stop you and ask "WTF is that??? And where can I get one?!""
Funds raised: $942,578
What it costs: $34.95 and up

Project: JoeyBra
What it is: A bra with built in pockets for gadgets.
Money quote: "The idea for this project came to me after I was gone for a long weekend. When I came back to check my computer, I had multiple notifications on Facebook from girls who had lost or broken their phones while going out and needed everyone's number."
Funds raised: $10,346
What it costs: $30 and up

Project: iMac Aquariums
What it is: Vintage iMacs with aquariums built in.
Money quote: "I already have 150 iMacs and the sources to get more."
Funds raised: $9,847
What it costs: $225 and up

Project: Panda Eco-Friendly Handmade Bamboo Sunglasses
What it is: Eco-friendly handmade bamboo sunglasses.
Money quote: "Bamboo is quickly becoming one of the most important plants in the world."
Funding raised: $19,485
What it costs: $48 and up

Project: Gift Couture Premium Wrapping Paper
What it is: Artisanal wrapping paper.
Money quote: "Our main goal is to produce unique papers that coordinate together into conceptualized themes and sets. This is exemplified in the Cheeseburger set that we chose to use as this initial project. This includes 5 different wrapping paper designs; a bun, hamburger, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes, all of the components of a Cheeseburger!"
Funding raised: $16,713
What it costs: $5 and up

Project: Biochemies DNA Molecule Plush Dolls
What it is: Adorable, googlie-eyed thymine, adenine, guanine, and cytosine.
Money quote: "I started Biochemies.com two years ago to promote science education. It features images that convey biology and chemistry-related concepts through personification with smiley faces. I encourage the free distribution of these images under Creative Commons and hope that teachers would incorporate these images to enhance their lessons and classroom decor. "
Funding raised: $33,706
What it costs: $35 and up

Project: Grilled Cheesus
What it is: A sandwich press that imprints bread with an image of Jesus.
Money quote: "However you slice it, the GRILLED CHEESUS™ lets you bring little grilled miracles to mealtime, snack time, or anytime."
Funding raised: $25,604
What it costs: $25 and up

The list could go on and on but a few honorable mentions to check out are Scanbox (a scanner setup for iPhones), Hickies ("turn your kicks into slip-ons!"), the HuMn Wallet ("the best minimal RFID blocking wallet"), Loomi (a sculptural, recylable lamp), WineHive (a sculptural, modular wine rack), and Urbio Vertical Garden (magnetic, modular planters). Bought anything good lately?

Apresiasi Rosberg untuk Segenap Awak Tim

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 04:19:00 PDT

- Nico Rosberg kembali menunjukkan performa menjanjikan dalam balapan yang berlangsung di Monte Carlo, Monaco akhir pekan ini. Mengawali lomba dari grid kedua, Rosberg tampil konsisten mempertahankan posisi hingga usai.

Pembalap berkebangsaan Jerman itu finis di belakang Mark Webber yang keluar sebagai pemenang. Start sempurna serta kerja keras mekanik tim membuahkan akhirnya membuahkan hasil gemilang bagi Mercedes GP di sirkuit berbasis jalan raya itu.

"Mekanik dan tim memberikan saya start luar biasa. Saya bisa melakukannya dengan sangat baik," kata Rosberg sumringah.

Namun, guratan kekecewaan masih terlihat jelas di wajah Rosberg lantaran tidak bisa melewati Mark Webber yang berada nyaris tanpa jarak di depannya selama lomba.

"Saya tidak mampu melewatinya. Setelah itu, Webber melakukan balapan sempurna, dia mampu mengendalikannya," bilang pembalap 26 tahun tersebut.

Meski kecewa tidak mampu berdiri di podium pertama, Rosberg tetap mensyukuri hasil bagus di sirkuit sempit itu. Mengakhiri balapan di urutan kedua tetap prestasi istimewa buatnya.

"Secara kesuluruhan, itu akhir pekan yang bagus buat saya dan tim. Saya merasa, kami memiliki mobil terbaik. Jadi, mari berharap ada banyak kesuksesan datang dalam beberapa balapan selanjutnya," tutur Rosberg. "Ini sangat spesial berada di sini. Rasanya fantastis bisa mendapatkan podium dengan cara seperti itu," sambungnya.

Dia menambahkan. "Saya merasa memiliki peluang tetapi saya harus berjuang dengan ban dan Fernando Alonso terus berada di belakang saya. Momen ini sangat sulit, terlebih setelah ban tidak mencapai tempratur ideal."

Spurs Cetak Kemenangan ke-19 Beruntun di NBA

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 02:44:00 PDT

- San Antonio Spurs belum terbendung. Tampil di final pertama Wilayah Barat NBA 2012, Tony Parker dan kawan-kawan meraih kemenangan 101-98 atas Oklahoma City Thunder, sekaligus menjadi yang ke-19 secara beruntun.

Bertanding di AT&T Center, Minggu 27 Mei 2012, waktu San Antonio, Spurs langsung mencatatkan keunggulan 24-18 di kuarter pertama. Namun, di kuarter berikutnya Thunder berhasil bangkit dan balik unggul setengah bola, 47-46.

Bahkan di kuarter ketiga, Kevin Durant Cs semakin merentangkan keunggulan menjadi 71-62. Tapi di kuarter penutup, Spurs kembali menunjukkan tajinya dengan mencetak 39 poin dan hanya memberikan lawan 27 poin. Skor akhir 101-98 buat kemenangan tuan rumah.

Meskipun kalah, Kevin Durant tetap menjadi performer terbaik di game ini dengan torehan 27 poin, 10 rebound dan 4 assist. Sedangkan Manu Ginobili yang memulai pertandingan dari bangku cadangan Spurs, berada di posisi kedua dengan raihan 26 poin 5 rebound serta 3 assist.

"Mereka sempat menggilas kami karena kurang agresif. Tapi, kami bisa membalikkannya di babak kedua," kata Ginobili selepas pertandingan dikutip dari situs NBA.

Spurs dan Thunder akan bertemu kembali pada Selasa, 29 Mei 2012. Game nanti masih dilangsungkan di kandang Spurs. (one)

Subhan-Rifat Raih Hasil Positif di Acropolis

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Mon, 28 May 2012 01:13:44 PDT

- Dua pereli Indonesia, Subhan Aksa (Bosowa Rally Team) dan Rifat Sungkar (Fastron World Rally Team), meraih hasil positif pada kejuaraan dunia reli di Acropolis, Yunani, 24-27 Mei.

Hanya 29 peserta dari 54 peserta yang berhasil finis pada seri balapan dengan jarak tempuh total 1661,39 kilometer selama empat hari tersebut. Subhan Aksa/Judd Jeff yang bertarung di kelas Production World Rally Championship (PWRC) berhasil meraih posisi dua dengan catatan 5 jam 25 menit dan 15,1 detik.

Pasangan Ukraina V.Gorban /A.Nicolaine meraih posisi pertama dengan catatan waktu 5 jam 22 menit dan 57,6 detik. Di posisi overall reli Acropolis, Subhan menempati posisi ke-15.

Sukses ini membuat Subhan untuk kali pertama mengibarkan bendera Merah Putih di panggung reli dunia. Di klasemen sementara PWRC, Subhan menempati peringkat keenam.

Hasil positif juga diraih pereli Indonesia lainnya, Rifat Sungkar, yang tergabung dengan Fastron World Rally Team. Didampingi co-driver Steve Lancester (Inggris), Rifat berhasil meraih posisi ketiga kelas World Rally Class Championship (WRCC). Dalam posisi overall, Rifat menempati posisi 20.

Reli Acropolis diakui sebagai seri terberat pada kejuaraan dunia reli, karena lintasannya yang berbatu lepas, tandus dan di ketinggian pegunungan mencapai 4000-4300 meter di atas permukaan laut.

"Reli Acropolis sangat luar biasa. Treknya bervariasi batu lepas dan batu tanam, naik-turun bukit dengan tipisnya oksigen. Lintasannya lebar tapi sangat berbahaya saat keluar jalur," ujar Rifat dalam rilis yang diterima VIVAnews.

Setelah reli Acropolis ini, Subhan dan Rifat akan melanjutkan pertarungan di negara yang berbeda. Subhan akan bertarung di seri Selandia Baru (Juli), Jerman (Agustus), Italia (Oktober) dan Spanyol (November). Sedangkan Rifat akan tampil di seri Jerman, Prancis, Italia dan Spanyol. (irb)

Robert Downey (Belum) Mau Digantikan Sebagai 'IRON MAN'

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Sun, 27 May 2012 03:07:00 PDT

- Mendengar perkataan Kevin Feige tentang kemungkinan kelanjutan seri IRON MAN dengan aktor utama selain dirinya, Robert Downey Jr menyatakan bahwa ia ingin bermain menjadi Tony Stark selama mungkin.

"Aku akan sangat marah jika orang lain merasa bahwa mereka dapat menggantikanku," tegasnya kepada MTV News saat malam penutupan Tribeca Film Festival 2012 Sabtu (28/4) waktu setempat. Setelahnya ia langsung memecah ketegangan dengan menanyakan siapa yang bakal menggantikannya. "Apakah kamu? Apakah kamu ke sini untuk memberitahuku?" katanya kepada wartawan. Meski demikian, Robert tak tahu sampai kapan ia bisa memerankan sosok Tony.

Satu hal yang menjadi syarat mutlak Robert dalam memerankan Tony Stark adalah penggarapan film yang harus bagus. "Ini semua tentang kualitas dan produk yang bakal membuatmu bereaksi sama puasnya. Selama mereka melakukannya, mungkin aku akan terus muncul," ujarnya setelah memastikan bakal kembali dalam IRON MAN 3.

Ia tak sabar bermain dengan aktor sekelas Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce dan Jessica Chastain dalam film ketiga nanti. Franchise yang dalam dua film pertama selalu menjadi hit ini memang direncanakan untuk menjadi sebuah seri panjang seperti James Bond. Kevin Feige sendiri yang mengatakannya.

"Jika nantinya ia tak lagi bermain dalam seri ini, aku tetap di sini membuat filmnya. Kami tak akan membawanya ke Afghanistan kembali (cerita IRON MAN). Aku pikir kami akan men-James Bondkan seri ini," pungkasnya. Sebelum jauh memikirkan siapa yang bakal menggantikan Robert, tunggu saja film ketiganya nanti yang berkisah tentang sepak terjang sang Iron Man dengan nanoteknologi. (ace/dka)

A Very Brief Visual History of the Typewriter

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:35:00 PDT

This excerpt from a World War II-era instructional film includes an overview of early typewriters. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, Basic Typing is 30 minutes long and available in two parts (part I, part II), in case you happen to be extremely interested in a career as a typist, circa 1944.

Higher resolution images of these historic models of typewriters are available thanks to Wikipedia. The first model mentioned in the film, the Typographer, patented by William Austin Burt in 1829, was America's first typewriter. An illustration of Burt demonstrating the device and a diagram from the patent are below.

The Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer, below, was the first to feature a QWERTY keyboard, in 1873.

For more images of typewriters through the ages, see Nicholas Jackson's "Last Typewriter Factory in the World Shuts Its Doors."

For more films from the Prelinger Archive, visit http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger.

Gawker Gives Comments Some Love, and Now We Know Why

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Fri, 25 May 2012 04:49:00 PDT

Comment sections are notoriously neglected by online publications. But that may change if sites can figure out how to monetize readers' attention there.

Peter Vaclavek/Shutterstock

Earlier this spring, Gawker unveiled a shiny new comments system that was clearly a labor of love. Someone -- or, rather, a group of people with Gawker's Nick Denton at the top -- had put some real thought into this new system, trying to solve the problem of designing a system that fosters intelligent conversation among multiple parties. The answer, it seemed, involved diffuse human moderation from thread "owners," a tree-like structure for conversation branches, and an algorithm that would hunt down comments for high-quality text and promote them.

When I first read about the new system, I was cheered. Comment sections are notoriously the red-headed stepchildren of online journalism, but also the greatest unrealized potential. Creating a high-quality comments section tends to be seen as too costly, either in terms of capital or time, with too little financial return to merit the investment required. But a great comments section could make a good site really sing, giving writers important feedback and enticing them to produce smarter content, with the result being a positive feedback loop that would benefit the site and the readers together. Is this why Gawker was putting comments at the heart of its new strategy?

That's what it seemed like initially. In a memo, Denton discussed his plans:

We plan to make the new discussion areas civil enough to encourage authors, experts and celebrities to come in for open Web chats. But writers should feel the comments are a place that you can develop your points with your sources, tipsters and friends. You should be looking forward to seeing the reaction to your article, not avoiding toxic commenters. So we'll radically overhaul the comment system technically to keep interesting conversations from being derailed.

This is some serious forward thinking. But, as Felix Salmon reports in Reuters, this was only part of the story. Gawker is going to take these intelligent conversations and figure out how to "to turn them into dollars." A new unit will work with marketers to figure out how they can engage with potential customers directly in the comments sections of Gawker's sponsored posts. Because of the functions Gawker has created for thread owners in the platform, companies will have "quite a lot of control over which comments in that thread will get featured."

It's a fine line to walk. Bringing marketers and giving them so much control could itself dampen or shape conversation. But if Gawker manages to pull it off (and right now it's not looking too good for online ad-revenue-supported content in general), perhaps more companies will invest in commenting platforms that will make online journalism -- and the experience of reading it -- better. And, of course, the revenue won't hurt either.

Plan a Trip Through History With ORBIS, a Google Maps for Ancient Rome

noreply@blogger.com (yogya phone) — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:17:00 PDT

Rather than encounter history as a linear story, we see it as a world more like our own, one in which we're actors with sets of competing choices laid out before us.

Say you were thinking about taking a trip this summer to Italy, and were considering a drive northward from Rome to the ancient coastal city of Ravenna. How long would it take? How would you go about finding that out?

Most likely, you'd use Google Maps, which would tell you that by car you could take a variety of routes, all of which would get you to Ravenna in about four and a half hours.

Now say, just hypothetically, that you wanted to make the same trip except -- and it's kind of a big exception -- that the year is not 2012 but 200, you're not traveling by car but by ox cart, and, just for a little extra challenge, let's say it's February. How long would that journey take?

To answer that question there's ORBIS, a sort of "Google Maps for Ancient Rome," which will tell you that the fastest way for a third-century traveler to get to Ravenna will be to take your ox cart to the sea, board a ship, and sail around Sicily, around the southern coast of Italy, and northward to Ravenna. It will take you nearly 15 days and cost nearly 400 denarii. Over land, the trip will last a month.

ORBIS is the project of a team at Stanford led by classicist Walter Scheidel and digital-humanities specialist Elijah Meeks. It is a model of the ancient world, including more than 750 settlements, 4 million square miles of space, 50,000 miles of land routes, 20,000 miles of inland waterways (rivers and canals), and nearly 1,000 routes among sea ports. By playing with ORBIS's interactive map, you can grasp at how geography -- distance, really -- appeared to a person living nearly 2,000 years ago under the reach of the Roman empire. And if you want to think like a Roman, there's a lot to be gleaned from the richness of the dataset and the interactive little tool you can explore it with.

But ORBIS also tells us something that goes beyond the reach of Ancient Rome, right to us here in 2012. And what that is comes not from the content of ORBIS, but in the reaction to it, which has been, at least in technical terms, overwhelming, slowing the site down dramatically and requiring some updating just to deal with the traffic. Yes, you read that right: An academic site on the travel routes of Ancient Romans has been inundated with visitors since its launch three weeks ago, beginning with a not-too-shabby trickle of 1,200 visits on the first day, and ratcheting up to a total of 100,000 visitors in less than three weeks, with some days hitting 15,000 unique views. Why do so many people want to know how long it took to get from Rome to Ravenna 2,000 years ago?

It's not that that information is so interesting on its own merit, but that ORBIS has given us a way to look at a world -- the ancient one -- with an interface that is from our own time. The interactive trip planner acts as a translator for us, speaking our language but telling us about a foreign place. Moreover, as Ars Technica writer Curt Hopkins puts it, the site uses "technology to approach history as a system instead of a static collection of data." So rather than encounter history as one linear story, we encounter it as a world more like our own, one in which we are actors with sets of competing choices laid out before us.

It's this feeling -- something almost like being a player in a role-playing game of Ancient Rome -- that makes ORBIS a fun way to explore history and has brought so many people to the site. Further evidence: Another tool on the site -- in fact the tool that ORBIS was built around -- has garnered far less interest. That tool is the "dynamic distance cartogram" which morphs the geography around a single point, such that a distance between two points no longer represents miles but rather represents how long the journey would take or how much it would cost. Thus you could see all points within a 12-day journey from Constantinopolis, even though some will be much farther away by distance because they are quick to reach by sea.

This tool is in some ways more informative than the route planner. You can see at a glance all the points one major city is connected to by trade, rather than having to test a variety of points and see which take less time. But people aren't playing around with this tool very much at all. "A tech friend of mine was laughing at the metrics," Meeks told Hopkins. "It'll show 50,000 people looking at the maps but only 100 using the interactive distance cartogram." Perhaps this is because that tool is a little less intuitive and a little less centrally placed on the website. But even once you find it and play around with it, it just doesn't have the same charm as the trip planner. We don't see the world that way today, and it doesn't square with how we use information and make decisions.

There is a big audience out there for a site that enables your imagination to spin out a bit more freely over the terrain of the ancient world, and much of that audience is plugged into social sites such as Reddit where they can share a good find and turn out in droves. "This is why the internet is wonderful, " says Cyriaque Lamar of io9 of the ORBIS site. But it's not just ORBIS that makes the Internet wonderful, but the people who eat it up -- the curious explorers who may not be going to third-century Ravenna, but are certainly thinking through their route.