"nextdoor" via Joko in Google Reader

The arrogance of willful ignorance

2011-07-07T09:52:00Z

People have come before us, failed, learned, written it down. Scientists have figured out what works, and proven it. Economists have gained significant understanding about the long-term impacts of short-term decisions. And historians have seen it all before.

How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes... How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?

If you're doing important work (and I'm hoping you are), then you owe it to your audience or your customers or your co-workers to learn everything you can. Feel free to ignore what you learn, but at least learn it.

Atlanta Teacher Uses Angry Birds for Physics Lessons

2011-07-06T22:00:00Z

Addicted to playing Angry Birds? Maybe a better question might be, who isn't addicted to the game? And savvy science teachers are capitalizing on the Angry Birds phenomenon by using it to teach physics lessons.

"What are the laws of physics in the Angry Birds world?" John Burk, a ninth-grade physics teacher at the private Westminster Schools in Atlanta, put that question to his students and gave them the chance to "be among the first to find the answer." Burk became interested in using Angry Birds in the classroom last winter, and began blogging about teaching with it. Given that the birds are catapulted into the sky, it was the perfect tool for teaching students the laws of projectile motion. In about 30 minutes, the teens were able to thoroughly understand, as Burk wrote on his blog, "the two big ideas of projectile motion: the horizontal component of motion is constant velocity, while the vertical component is constant acceleration."

But don't think that students are hunched over their mobile phones in Burk's class. It turns out that one of the main reasons Angry Birds has become a popular education tool with physics teachers nationwide is that Google Chrome made it available on the web. That makes it easier for teachers and students to use it in the classroom and scientifically analyze the launching birds. As for Burk's students, he says they had so much fun learning physics with Angry Birds that they're eager for him to bring more gaming technology into the classroom. Up next? Lessons with Tiny Wings.

photo via Quantum Progress

Carmageddon's Hollywood Ending? Crowdsourcing Will Help L.A. Survive Sans 405

2011-07-05T22:41:17Z

Next week, a major L.A. highway will close for two straight days. Traffic app Waze is offering its user-generated traffic information to the city's TV stations in hopes of easing congestion and attracting new users.

Think driving in Los Angeles is bad now? Just wait until July 15, a day that is being labeled "Carmageddon." That's when the entire 405 freeway shuts down for construction for two days--an event that will affect 500,000 angry drivers. Enter Waze, the crowdsourced navigation app that might just save Los Angelenos from tearing their hair out (and wasting gasoline while stalled in traffic).

The app, which has 4.5 million users in 45 countries, allows users to enter real-time road reports in exchange for credit in the Waze community. During Carmageddon, Waze is teaming up with local news station KABC Channel 7 to offer on-the-air updates for drivers looking for alternate routes. "We'll be giving the realtime citizen perspective on all detours, not just ones that the city provides," says Di-Ann Eisnor, the VP of platform and partnerships at Waze.

Waze already offers real-time updates on Israel's Channel 2, the country's biggest news network. Members of the Waze community can sign up for a "Channel 2" group, and the network will contact them if they are within the vicinity of an event and there isn't a journalist on the scene.

[youtube Apjn0pLjD0s]

Waze's partnership with KABC is a one-off thing. And while most drivers won't be watching network news while trying to navigate through traffic, the on-air exposure means Waze could gain plenty of new users--and that could ultimately mean more accurate traffic reports in L.A. and beyond.

Follow @fastcompany.

LiveAndTell, A Crowdsourced Quest To Save Native American Languages

2011-07-05T22:07:46Z

While you won't have any trouble finding a way to learn Spanish, French, or German in the United States, brushing up on your Lakota or Navajo isn't so easy.

The Endangered Language Fund projects that half of the languages spoken on earth will disappear in the next century, and Native American tongues are among them. The Administration for Native Americans reports that when the U.S. was founded, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken. That number has since dropped to 175, and only 20 are taught to children. The rest, it says, “are classified as deteriorating or nearing extinction.”

In an attempt to preserve endangered indigenous dialects such as Lakota and Ho Chunk, South Dakota-based programmer Biagio Arobba has built LiveAndTell, a user-generated content site for sharing and learning Native languages. It can work for any language, but his passion is to preserve the endangered tongues you won't find in textbooks, language programs, or widely taught in classrooms. "For Native American languages, there's a scarcity of learning materials,” Arobba says. “Native American languages are in a crisis and we have not moved very far beyond paper and pencil methods.”

Arobba, 32, is a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. He built LiveAndTell as an efficient, easy-to-use way to pass the Lakota Sioux language (and others) from older generations to younger ones. An accompanying Facebook page is intended to introduce the languages to a broader audience.

LiveAndTell lets users create "audio tags" for pictures, similar to tagging on Facebook or Flickr. An audio recorder allows a Lakota speaker to record a message with each picture. They can also post a series of audio or text below each picture. In essence, it’s Flickr meets Rosetta Stone. The pictures and album can be embedded into other websites as well. LiveAndTell has no upfront participation fees; users can sign in and start creating content immediately.

As LiveAndTell expands, Arobba is working with area tribes to integrate the website into tribal sites, and is running workshops so Lakota speakers can learn how to input photos, audio, and text. He's planning mobile versions for the iPhone and Android platforms. He's also collaborating with Oglala Lakota College and others to apply for National Science Foundation funding.

The potential for learning languages online is already vast: Wikiversity, a multilingual hub project of the Wikimedia Foundation, is building encyclopedic information in a variety of languages. Livemocha.com offers Gaelic (Irish or Scottish), among dozens of other languages. Babbel.com boasts more than a million users learning several languages, and has mobile apps to build vocabulary. And the ambitious Rosetta Project by the Long Now Foundation aims to document what it estimates as 7,000 languages currently in use, starting with 500.

But the opportunities are fewer for indigenous languages. While technology has the potential to help preserve indigenous languages and maintain indigenous communities, the National Science Foundation notes that globalization threatens to diminish the native languages and change the way indigenous people live and communicate.

Language market leader Rosetta Stone does have an endangered language program, which in Arobba's view, is useful, but limited, since it takes a long time to produce a small number of languages. There are currently a half dozen languages in the program, and each takes roughly two years to capture and produce. It also released a Navajo language program in 2010. A spokeswoman at Rosetta Stone said its products are scientifically grounded in the process of learning languages because their endangered language programs are led by "scientists, linguists, and people immersed in these cultures and languages."

In contrast, Arobba says LiveAndTell is organic and culturally enriching. "There is civic value in posting content," he says. "For the people posting the content, there's a cultural context there, too." Native speakers can take photos and record words depicting life familiar to the young people who are learning the languages in their own communities. It also doesn't require high production costs the way Rosetta Stone's programs do. "The main thing," Arobba says, "is just lowering the barriers and the costs for everybody."

Follow author Paul Glader on Twitter @paulglader or @WiredAcademic.

[Image via Flickr user Hamner_Photos]

Uneven Ankle-Breaking Basketball Court

2011-07-05T20:00:00Z

In Munich, Germany there lies an insane basketball court on the grounds of an occupational school. It may look like a regular court from far, but come up close and you'll soon realize that it would be nearly impossible to play a game on it! Art collective Inges Idee designed this wacky space. The playable court was morphed in a 3D program to make it resemble the grounds of a roller coaster with highs and lows. It makes for quite the recreational space complete with hoops and, yes, lights!

Photos: Markus Buck
via [Neatorama]

Shilling the Male Pill: How to Sell Men Birth Control

2011-07-05T18:30:00Z

There's a joke in the medical community that no matter what year it is, an alternative male birth control method is always ten years away. And it’s true—doctors have been promising an option beyond condoms and vasectomies since the 1960s. Some scientists have taken a stab at it, most recently with the invention of RISUG, a one-time injection that is supposedly both side effect-free and reversible. Yet nothing ever seems to get approved and make it to market. What the hell is taking so long?

Men aren’t alone here. As we pointed out a few months ago, pharmaceutical companies aren’t exactly rushing to innovate new birth control for women, either. Part of the problem is biology; the human reproductive system is a complex thing. But when it comes to the possibility of a male pill, there’s also that pesky problem of marketing. What kind of dude is going to buy a birth-control drug meant to protect another person from pregnancy? There are financial and emotional concerns to having an unwanted child, but ultimately men are affected indirectly. It’s a tough sell.

"It could be very effective in preventing pregnancy, but if there isn't a clear market for it, companies understandably are a little reluctant to invest heavily in it," Andrea Tone, professor of history at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, told CNN last year.

But all hope is not lost. I’ve devised a handy marketing plan to light a fire under the asses of pharmaceutical companies willing to wait another decade. Here’s how to sell the Pill to men.

* * *

Market it to guys in committed relationships.

Frankly, very few men are going to be using both condoms and another form of birth control; most of them would be trying to find a method to use in lieu of condoms. Don’t get me wrong, condoms are great: cheap, easy to use, reliable, and protective against STDs. But only 9 percent of married couples globally use condoms, and they might be looking around for another method.

“For a guy who’s with someone he presumably loves, he wants to look out for the wellbeing of that woman,” says Hugo Schwyzer, a male feminist blogger and gender studies professor at Pasadena City College. “It’s a whole different level of ask for men to care in advance about the needs of an abstract woman who he hasn’t even slept with yet.”

Many men have witnessed first-hand their partners’ travails with birth control, some of which—like mood swings and lack of sex drive—certainly affect men. Guys: wouldn’t it be nice to present your honey with a solution? Women are also much more likely to feel comfortable putting contraceptive responsibility in a guy’s hands if they’re in a relationship with a lot of trust and communication.

Selling contraception to couples is not a new idea—companies have been marketing to married women since the birth control pill was invented in 1960. In fact, it was illegal for a single lady to get on the Pill until 1972. Certain methods like the IUD still have commercials with 38-year-old married women assuring us that her three kids are enough. In these cases, though, speaking to coupled-up women has more to do with ensuring you’re not giving the thumbs up to sluts who have premarital sex. Marketing the pill to men has the exact opposite motivation; while we were afraid that single women would use the Pill, now we’re worried that single men won’t.

Sample ad: A jolly Kevin James type is in the drivers’ seat of a minivan. His four kids bounce around in the back, and his wife sits in the front seat serenely. He confides in the camera: "Holly went a little crazy when she was on the Pill. Like, crying-at-cat-food-commercials crazy. Slamming-doors-for-no-reason crazy. She felt edgy and stressed all the time. So I decided to give her a present: I went on Prospermacil." Cut to scenes of the husband popping a pill while the wife happily cooks, gently shuts the screen door, has drinks with her friends, sculpts pottery, etc. Brief, sexy shot of husband and wife "connecting."

Tagline: Prospermacil. What have you done for your lady lately?

* * *

Appeal to the inner neanderthal.

Of course, this committed family man doesn’t need to be a caring, sharing feminist. Some guys may be more into male BC if they channel their 30,000 B.C. counterpart.

“It’s not just for guys who are in touch with their feelings,” says Glenn Sacks, executive director of the men’s rights group Fathers and Families and a huge advocate of male birth control. “It’s about manning up and taking care of your woman. And being in control of your fertility. No man wants to have a kid against their will. It doesn’t matter if they’re liberal or not.” He’s right about that—a woman’s decision to take birth control certainly doesn’t have much to do with her politics. A full 98 percent of Catholic women use some form of contraception. And given that more than 99 percent of women have used birth control, I’m guessing there’s a few conservatives in there.

Schwyzer also suggests that male birth control could be framed as a badge of honor for a sexually active man, “sort of the 21st century equivalent of virginal boys carrying around condoms in their wallets.” The thought of the American Pie characters bragging about their ball-sack injections is pretty hilarious. And a lot better than unintended pregnancy!

Sample ad campaign: Four guys shoot the shit over beers. The tallest, most good-looking one announces proudly that he went and got the RISUG shot yesterday. His friends look at him strangely. One says, “For real, dude? Sarah got you whipped or something?” The tall guy is nonplussed and shoots them down. “Please. I just like looking out for her, ya know? I figure a little shot is worth all that. What, are you scared?” Tall guy retains alpha male image, friend looks like a douchebag.

Tagline (recited by the Right Guard guy): Be a man. Take the pain. Get the Shot.

* * *

When all else fails, remember Arnold and Maria.

When Kyle Munkittrick wrote a piece defending male birth control in Discover magazine a few months ago, he says readers worried about “how it could be named the ‘cheater pill.’” Allow me to give that a more positive spin: a male contraceptive could protect a dude’s family, whether or not he has the willpower to use a condom. Given that up to half of people have strayed from their relationships at least once, there’s a sizable population that would probably be open to this message.

Mob wives have been known to ask their philandering husbands to get vasectomies "for the sake of the family." Male birth control could be a reversible version of this kind of insurance. Arnold Schwarzenegger could probably tell you that a male pill would save couples from heartbreak, divorce, and public embarrassment.

Sample ad campaign (to be played on SpikeTV, then immediately to be skewered by Tina Fey): Four guys shoot the shit at a dadchelor party. “Congrats, man!” one guy says as he slaps the new father on the back. “Now when are you getting some Fertilanix?” The daddy looks confused. “Oh, Kathy’s on the Pill. We’re cool.” The three guys exchange knowing looks. One ogles a busty waitress and says, “Dude. We’re not worried about Kathy.”

Tagline: Think of the family. Think Fertilanix.

* * *

Men will never experience the anxiety that women feel about an unwanted pregnancy. But there are tons of incentives for guys to take fertility into their own hands. Perhaps some scrappy filmmaker should start a public-awareness campaign of viral male birth control videos to drum up demand. That way, we'd have a ready-made set of ads to use when a successful method comes out on the market—in another ten years, of course.

photo (cc) by Flickr user Ryan Somma

Софтуерната фирма Busols предлага безплатни инсталации на свободен софтуер за малки и средни фирми

2011-07-06T10:06:00Z

Компанията стартира инициатива за привличане на вниманието към потенциала на софтуера с отворен код

Terrifyingly Cool Rooftop Playground

2011-07-06T01:00:00Z

Talk about living on the edge! Danish firm JDS Architects has designed one incredibly cool rooftop playground in a densely populated area of Copenhagen.

Located on top of three penthouses, the shock absorbing surface (aka the grass hill) is the perfect place for daredevil kids and their worried parents to run rampant. For quieter times, they can marvel at the cityscape on the viewing platform or relax around the outdoor barbecue.

A little freaky, don't you think? Let's look on the bright side. Although that low fence must be a nightmare for parents, children who come out unscathed from that death defying experience may grow up to become even more adventurous and confident than the average person!

JDS Architects website

The $10 minibar beer is no basis for capitalism

2011-07-05T22:00:27Z

Most of us have better things to do than undertake a discounted cash flow calculation of the lifetime cost of a £50 document printer, writes John Kay

Paying attention to the attention economy

2011-07-05T09:34:00Z

Most of us are happily obsessed with the economy of money. We earn it and we spend it and we generally pay attention to what things cost.

Certainly, salespeople and marketers are truly focused on the price of things, on commissions and shelving allowances and net margin and the cost of goods sold.

With all of these easily measured activity, it's easy to overlook the fast-growing and ever more important economy based around attention.

"If I alert my entire customer base, how much will this cost me in permission?"

"How much time do we save our customers with a better written manual?"

"When we fail to ask for (and reward) the privilege of following up, are we wasting permission?"

"Does launching this product to an audience of stangers waste the attention we're going to have to buy?"

Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

Why Google+ could find a home in the workplace

2011-07-04T17:40:56Z

Last week, Google rolled out a beta of its highly-anticipated new social networking platform, Google+. Reaction to the launch so far has been mainly positive, with praise for the app’s design and features. But having played with Google+ over the last few days, I think that it may find a home in a somewhat unexpected market: the workplace.

While Facebook and Twitter have been massively successful in the consumer space, they’re not really suited for use in the workplace, as they make it difficult to keep personal and work-related information separate, and few companies would be happy about the possibility of potentially confidential information being broadcast to the world. Google, however, has produced an app that’s much more suited for use in the workplace by building Google+ around its Circles feature, which enables users to limit the sharing of information to specific groups of people, and by incorporating some very useful built-in collaboration features.

Circles, effortless contact management

Google+ is a lot like Facebook, offering users the ability to connect to other users, post status updates, share links and photos, and so on. But where it differs from apps like Facebook is its use of Circles, which allows users to define groups of contacts and then only share specific updates and other information with that group. Circles are effectively easy-to-understand privacy controls. They can be set up via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and there doesn’t appear to be any limitations on the number of them you can define.

You could, for instance, have a Circle for all of your work colleagues, a Circle for your team and then also create ad hoc Circles for project teams as required. This ability to easily control who you share specific pieces of information with is powerful, and very useful in the workplace: you may only want to send an update regarding the status or a project to only those colleagues working on that project, for example.

Facebook has tried to give users a similar degree of control over contact management with its Lists feature, but it’s clunky and nowhere near as well-implemented or as central to the experience as Circles is; while Google + is effectively built on top of Circles, Facebook’s Lists feature feels like an afterthought.

As Google+ is a general-purpose social networking tool, a user can connect with any other Google+ user. This means that, unlike with many of the private enterprise social networking apps like Yammer, Jive, tibbr, Socialtext and Salesforce Chatter, people can use the app to easily communicate and collaborate with people outside of their organization — contractors or clients, for example.

Hangouts, Google+’s killer app for remote teams

Hangouts is Google+’s built-in multi-user video chat tool. It allows users to chat with up to ten people simultaneously and it’s really well implemented. Unlike other video chat apps, where you generally have to ping the other people you want to chat with on IM or email, get them to open their video chat client and then connect with them, Hangouts enables you to “hang out” in a video chat room, advertising your availability to chat to your contacts. If no-one else is around, you can leave it running in the background.

It’s all browser-based, so the user doesn’t have to fire up another app, and allows for much more spontaneous and effortless collaboration than other video chat app I’ve tried. I think it could potentially come close to replicating an “in office” experience for remote teams, allowing for the virtual equivalent of wandering up to a colleague’s desk to discuss a problem, or the traditional “water cooler” social chat.

Hangouts has an intuitive interface: Whoever is currently talking is highlighted in the large central window, with everyone else displayed in strip of smaller windows underneath. In my testing, it works really well, with little lag. There’s a built-in IM feature for sharing links and so on, and also a YouTube feature, which enables users to share the watching of YouTube videos (which is neat, but probably not all that useful in the workplace). As Om noted, Hangouts is group video chat done right. It’s much better than Skype’s somewhat clunky group video chat feature, it’s free, and as it’s standards-based, it could be integrated into other applications, too (if you’re curious, Janko has written an interesting overview of the standards-based tech used to build the service).

Hangouts isn’t Google+’s only collaboration tool. It also features a built-in group texting feature called Huddle (see Stacey’s review here), which is currently only available on Android handsets.

Keep your team up-to-date with Sparks

Another great feature that differentiates Google+ from Facebook is Sparks. It lets users define an interest (robotics, for example), and then trawls the web looking for articles related to that interest, making it easy for users to find relevant articles to share. This could be useful in the workplace for research or keeping abreast of industry news, for example, helping users to stay up-to-date with topics of interest to them and their team, and then easily share and discuss any particularly interesting bits of information.

Why Google+ isn’t the perfect enterprise social-networking tool — yet

While Google + is well designed and has a lot of really great features, it’s not the perfect enterprise social networking tool just yet; it’s got a way to go before companies like Yammer and Salesforce should begin to really worry. Firstly, as Mathew noted, it needs users. Google+ is still in beta, but even after it launches to the general public, even if Google is massively successful in getting new users to sign up it will be a while before Google+ can get anywhere near rivaling Facebook’s numbers.

Secondly, Google+ isn’t yet set up to work with Google Apps accounts, which precludes a large number of potential enterprise users from using it with their main work email accounts. However, it’s probably safe to assume that Google+ will be made available to users of Google Apps soon — and the prospect of integrated social features in Google Apps powered by Google+ is a tantalizing one.

Finally, although Circles is an easy to use and intuitive way for users to determine who they share specific bits of share information with, it’s not perfect: there have already been reported privacy concerns with Google+ and Circles, with updates being forwarded on (or “reshared”) beyond the original Circle it was intended for. Google is being responsive to the concerns and is now addressing that particular issue, so hopefully any lingering privacy concerns will be ironed out before the product sees a more widespread release.

Of course, as Jess noted earlier today, the success of enterprise social networking tools depends on much more than just the technology itself. But Google’s latest foray into the social space is very well designed and offers a a great range of features. Assuming the company can tackle any privacy concerns that pop up and can persuade enough users to join the service and give it the initial traction it needs, Google+ could well become entrenched in the workplace.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

Мац, плик, плик

2011-07-01T13:30:00Z

Колкото и примамливи да ви изглеждат полиетиленовите торбички на Puma, до третия месец след покупката трябва да сте се разделили с тях. Напълно и завинаги, защото те са изработени от 100% биоразградим царевичен материал и оставени в околната среда, изчезват безвъзвратно. Нетърпеливите могат да пробват да ги ликвидират и по-бързо - за три минути в домашни условия с въртеливи движения в съд с гореща вода. Puma (показват как става това на http://www.puma.com/media/pumas-clever-little-shopper и)...

…

2011-06-30T21:00:00Z

Созданы светофоры для Стамбула — «Исиклариус».

"Why wasn't I informed?"

2011-07-01T09:59:00Z

Information is tricky. Sometimes it's delivered to you. Often, you need to go find it.

There's no blame in not being aware of something you had no idea you ought to be looking for. If you've been using the same brand of aftershave for five years, you're forgiven for not Googling it regularly to find out if it contains a carcinogen. That's information we'd like to come find us, not something we need to be on the alert for.

On the other hand, I'm stunned when someone enters new territory without doing a modicum of research. Consider the yutz who goes on vacation to a foreign land, only to discover on arrival that they're in the middle of monsoon season (happens every year around this time!) or that there's a civil war going on.

Or perhaps the small businessperson who launches an expensive marketing campaign without investing a few hours in reading up on what works and what doesn't.

Or the email novice who forwards an incredible email to her entire address list without checking Snopes first.

The rules are now clear: no one is going to inform you, but it's easier than ever to inform yourself. Before you spend the money, the time or the attention of your friends, look it up.

In.gredients Wants To Be The First Packaging And Waste-Free Grocery Store

2011-06-30T23:05:00Z

In an industry littered with excess packaging, it sounds like an impossible goal. And the Texas startup isn't just targeting waste, it's also going after food deserts, too.

In an industry littered with excess packaging, it sounds like an impossible goal: in.gredients, a startup out of Austin, Texas, wants to create the first zero-waste, packaging-free grocery store in the U.S.. Can this ever work?

When it launches later this year, in.gredients won't be in competition with your local Safeway; it won't even offer the same selection. You'll be able to find produce, grains, baking supplies, oils, dairy, meat, beer, wine, and household cleaners--but no Twinkies, Doritos, or other unhealthy snack foods that could also be found at your local corner store. In.gredients claims that it will carry "all the basic ingredients you need for life (and most recipes)."

"Most will perceive our competition as supermarkets, since we're literally revising what grocery shopping looks like. But really, our competition is hyper-consumerism, which is just not sustainable long-term," explains Brian Nunnery of in.gredients in an email to Fast Company. "If we were competing with supermarkets, we'd be setting up shop across the street from one. Instead, we're targeting areas where folks don't have easy access to good food--and are forced to buy unhealthy food out of convenience.".

But here's the thing: it's often the eco-conscious consumers who live in areas with plentiful fresh food that bring their own bags to the grocery store. How is in.gredients going to convince its customers to do the same? The company will offer compostable packaging inside the store, but customers in food deserts may at first still be uncomfortable with the idea of bulk foods, which can be intimidating to the uninitiated (just try scooping and tagging those grains as fast as you can while impatient customers wait behind you).

The company also admits that it's not entirely free of packaging--items that require minimal protection for food safety reasons will get recyclable, compostable, or reusable packaging. "We want to make good food accessible to our community," says Nunnery.

In any case, in.gredients may not actually the first packaging-free grocery store when it launches; Simply Bulk Market in Colorado already offers a packaging-free selection of bulk items. But in.gredients is open to franchising opportunities (and to food deserts), which means it could come to a city near you if it succeeds in Austin.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

California Cities Start Recycling Roads

2011-06-30T22:00:00Z

Recession is the mother of invention.

With transportation infrastructure in a sorry state in California—the proliferation of potholes in Los Angeles, for example, is incredible—more cities are turning to a method of repairing roads by recycling them. The cold in-place recycling process involves shaving off the top two to four inches of asphalt on a damaged road, pulverizing it and mixing it with additives, and then laying it back down and grading and compacting it. It's all done by a single train of machines and a road that's repaired this way can be used again the next day (a protective "overlay" is added a week later).

Conventional road repair, by contrast, involves removing six inches of asphalt, hauling it to the landfill, and replacing it with new asphalt. The process takes many days, is worse for the environment, and is more expensive.

In Gilroy, one of the California cities that's now using cold in-place recycling, a recent road repair project cost the city $120,000 instead of $200,000. TreeHugger points to a Metropolitan Transportation Commission report that says it emits 131,000 fewer pounds of CO2 per mile of road compared with conventional hot asphalt.

It's not an entirely new invention. It's been in use already in other parts of the United States and in Europe. But it looks like it's spreading now. Along with Gilroy, cities in the San Francisco Bay Area are getting involved.

It's a little crazy that this practice isn't just the norm given that it is, apparently, better by every measure. That's one silver lining of the recession: It's jolting cities out of sub-optimal standard practices that they wouldn't question if they had more money.

Photo (cc) from Flickr user Al Pavangkanan

How "Super Sand" Could Provide Drinking Water To Millions Of People

2011-06-29T22:38:57Z

Sand is a cheap and easy to find water filter. It's also not a very good water filter. But a new development--coating sand in graphite--could make it possible for everyone in the world to have easy access to clean water.

Nearly one billion people lack access to safe drinking water. There are creative ways to purify dirty water when a Brita isn't handy, to be sure--people living in areas with plentiful sand, for example, can pour water through sand and pebble-filled filters. But while the sand quickly filters water and removes large particles, it is, not surprisingly, ineffective at removing heavy metals, pathogens, and other toxins that find their way into dirty water.

A newly developed "coated sand," uses graphite oxide--a substance used in the chemical process for making pencil lead (or graphite)--to filter out the contaminants that regular sand can't touch. It could be cheap to produce and almost as plentiful as plain old sand.

[youtube 1nfddpRfEq0]

When Rice University researchers ran two model contaminants (mercury and Rhodamine B dye) through the super sand, they found that the coated substance removed contaminants as well as commercially available active carbon filtration systems. The big difference: The super sand is cheap. Graphite is inexpensive (waste graphite from mining operations could even be used), and the coating process can occur at room temperature.

Rice explains:

Nanosheets of graphite oxide can be tailored to have hydrophobic (water-hating) and hydrophilic (water-loving) properties. When mixed in a solution with sand, they self-assemble into coatings around the grains and keep the hydrophilic parts exposed. Adding aromatic thiol molecules to the coatings enhances their ability to sequester water-soluble contaminants.

Coated sand could, in other words, be at least one solution to our growing water crisis--along with cactus gum, the Tata Swach, and fog-harvesting devices.

[Top image via Flickr user Mouser NerdBot, homepage image via Flickr user YoTuT]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

Baix Llobregat primary school

2011-06-21T13:48:43Z

words Douglas Murphy

Mestura Arquitectes has built a new primary school in the Catalan district of Baix Llobregat near Barcelona. Situated in a fairly barren area of light industry and built in close proximity to a large expressway, it’s a fascinating mix of functionalism and exuberance.

The building is arranged in two wings around a courtyard play area, with facilities such as the dining and assembly halls in the single-storey wing and the classrooms in the taller central block. This is a fairly standard layout for a school, and many of the spaces are simple and durable in their execution, but the composition is greatly enlivened by the creation of a large, colourful screen along the facade of the main block.

The screen is made from a series of small ceramic blocks which provide passive solar shading from the bright sun to the south. Variation is created by having the slightly irregular blocks either extrude or intrude from the screen, and by glazing the tiles in a number of colours. This approach of varying basic units yields a number of effects. “The screen works on several levels,” says Jaime Blanco of Mestura. “From a distance it looks like an advertising hoarding, while from a middle distance what stands out is its three-dimensionality, which filters the light. From the inside it creates a double facade that controls the light and is an aesthetic element at the same time.”

Look along the facade in one direction and the tiles that face you are glazed in a series of autumnal reds, while turning in the other direction leaves you facing greens and yellows. The corridors that run behind the screen are thus bathed in subtle variations of tinted light.

The facade is reminiscent of classic South American modernist architecture, with more than a hint of Lucio Costa, but it’s also part of a local tradition of ceramics in architecture that continues to this day – Ceramica Cumella, which made the blocks for this project, also produced the “fruit bowl” roof of EMBT’s Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona, the doubly-curved tiles from Enric Ruiz-Geli’s Villa Nurbs (Icon 086), also nearby, and the jumbled tiles of Foreign Office Architects’ Spanish Pavilion for the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan. Mestura is working on a landscaped area under the expressway that enlivens the walk to school with yet more brightly coloured tiles and surfaces. “The use of ceramics has always enjoyed a leading role in Catalan architecture,” Blanco says. “It allows us to create interesting effects with the power of the Mediterranean light.”

top picture credit Pedro Pegenaute Esparza

credit Pedro Pegenaute Esparza

The UI Geniuses At Berg Rethink The Common Receipt

2011-06-29T11:39:47Z

A sales receipt generally does two things: It tells you what you bought and how much you paid for it. But since cash registers can already spit out a yard’s worth of coupons, why couldn’t they also dispense a fortune-cookie surprise: a factoid, say, that might make you chuckle? [vimeo 16423199] That was the starting point for the design team at Berg, which was commissioned by the ad agency Dentsu London last year to find inventive (and often delightful) ways of using the connectivity already embodied by ambient media and everyday products. (Icon magazine recently asked Berg to revisit its receipt concept, the results of which are shown here.) “A receipt is printed out by a till that is already connected to a complex system,” explains Matt Jones, a principal at Berg. “The receipt printer is kind of this tiny print-on-demand machine, which could display a lot more and take on a lot more input.” The resulting output, in turn, could take many forms and even be personalized based on customer surveys:

We’ve added semi-useful info-visualisation of the foods ordered based on “what the till knows” -- sparklines, trends -- and low-tech personalisation of information that might be useful to regulars. Customers can select events or news stories they are interested in by ticking a check box.

Receipts could potentially be used to bring awareness to social and health concerns, but Berg favors a lighter approach. “Not everyone can save the world every time," Jones says, "but you know, it’s quite good if you just make somebody smile for 15 seconds.”

The Rosetta Project Is Preserving Every Language Ever Spoken, On One Nano-Etched Piece Of Metal

2011-06-29T19:21:05Z

A project of the Long Now Foundation, the aim is to make sure we preserve the knowledge contained in dying languages: "If languages are our how-to guides for living on planet Earth, we are handing our descendants an encyclopedia with almost all of the pages ripped out."

The Long Now Foundation--currently breaking ground in Texas at the future site of its first monument-sized 10,000-year clock--is pursuing several programs in addition to the clock. One of these, the Rosetta Project, takes as its daunting mission the documentation of every human language currently in use; some 7,000 in total, the majority of which are in danger of disappearing without a trace. Directing this ambitious venture is Laura Welcher, a linguist who has specialized in building archival resources for indigenous North American languages. They're documenting the world's languages and storing them on one small disc that currently contains 13,000 microetched pages of word lists from 1,500 languages.

On July 30, she and her colleagues, in conjunction with online translation service Mightyverse.com and the Internet Archive, will throw a “Record-a-thon” in San Francisco. They’ll be capturing video of speakers of the Bay area’s more than 100 languages, as they tell stories and converse. We reached Welcher by email this week to ask her about the Record-a-thon and the Rosetta Project’s broader purpose, scope, and ambitions.

You're trying to make a record of every language in the world. How do you go about that?

There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, and it is likely that we will lose at least half of them--and some say up to 90%--in the next 100 years. With all our resources combined (money, experts in the field, community initiatives) we have a hope of maybe documenting 500 languages in the foreseeable future, but we need to scale this to about 5,000. The only way I can see to do this is by engaging speakers of languages themselves to produce their own language documentation. So, the question then becomes: What is the minimal amount of useful language documentation the average person might produce? I would argue it would be a verbal text--ideally a short video--and then I'd need to know what language the user thinks the recording is in (detailed identification can be done later).

The realization I've come to in the past year or so is most of us are carrying around language documentation devices in our own bag or back pocket--video enabled cell phones, cameras, laptops. If you project out 10 years, these devices become globally ubiquitous, and then anyone can create and contribute language documentation to a central repository. Then, as we assemble a collection of videos for any given language, we can start enriching them with transcriptions, translations, annotations--that is, building a corpus.

How will future researchers use that data, and what insights will they be able to glean?

A corpus can be used in many different ways--a small corpus can provide language learning and teaching materials, as well as materials for the building of linguistic resources such as grammars and dictionaries (this is the kind of language documentation linguists are producing today). Then, with a larger corpus--say tens of hours of transcribed speech, we can start building acoustic models for speech recognition. With a few million words we can start to do machine translation. And these are the tools that enable a language to be used online--which I would argue is a crucial new domain for language use in the modern world.

How will the corpus collected by the Rosetta Project differ from other archives of natural language?

Most language archives focus on languages of a particular region, or data collected under the umbrella of a particular project. The Rosetta Project is quite different in that we aim to assemble information on and in all human languages--all 7,000 of them. Not only is this a big effort, it is also a big challenge for how you organize all that information and make it usable to many different groups of people, from language specialists, to endangered language speech communities, to the interested general public, to an elementary school teacher or student.

So how are you going to reach the communities that speak endangered languages?

The project has to be visible and discoverable. What we've found over the past decade of building this collection is that speakers from small language groups find us--say if a speaker moves to a city, and has Internet access, and is doing a search to see what the Internet has to say about where he or she comes from. We may have some of the only documentation of their language available online. In the future, say within the next 10 years, I'm counting on ubiquitous Internet access through mobile devices, and those are the same ones that can be used to create language documentation. My want-to-have killer app would be a cross-platform "push this button and archive your language video in the Rosetta Project Collection."

What form will these recordings take, and how will their longevity be ensured?

Ideally video. Audio is fine too, but video is better because it is a richer source of language information--it also documents context (to help with what the speaker is talking about, or pointing to), speech participants (like a conversation, or public speaking event), as well as the speaker's body and facial gestures.

We'll be adding them to a collection in the Internet Archive which (along with the Rosetta Project) has a commitment to their long term preservation, migration, and dissemination. To contribute recordings during the Record-a-thon event, participants will need to assign recordings a CC license, so we will be building an open collection. Openness is one of the keys to longevity, since, in the long run, unused or inaccessible resources are more likely to be lost. And unlike a lot of smaller language archives, the Internet Archive is very "discoverable" so people will come across the collection more easily, which promotes access, use and LOCKSS ("lots of copies keeps stuff safe").

Given that our knowledge of languages from 10,000 years in the past is shadowy and fragmented at best, the idea of offering a snapshot of living language today for our descendants ten millennia from now is awe-inspiring, to be sure. But what's will be the value of collecting all of today's endangered languages?

Human language has taken thousands of years to reach the amount of differentiation we see today, with more than 100 different language families that aren't demonstrably related. Many of these languages have only a few thousand speakers and represent humanity's store of knowledge of how to survive--and indeed live--in all of the myriad environments of the planet. If languages are our how-to guides for living on planet earth, and we stand to lose up to 90% of them, then that seems like we are looking at handing our descendants an encyclopedia of human life on Earth with all of the pages ripped out, except sections X, Y, and Z.

But how does the project solve the problem of intelligibility going forward? Will future visitors to the Long Now clocks have some means of recording their own languages through the next 10,000 years' many generations?

One effort of the Rosetta Project is producing a physical backup in the form of the Rosetta Disk. This disk (microscopic pages of information formed in solid nickel, readable with 500 times magnification) has parallel information like word lists, texts, grammatical information for as many human languages as we've been able to find this documentation--so far about 2,500. This parallel collection effort has its inspiration in the original Rosetta Stone artifact, whose parallel texts enabled the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby unlocking an entire ancient civilization. And even if it is not used for such a future purpose, it is at least a pretty good snapshot of human cultural diversity on 21st century planet earth--a diversity we might not have in the near future, nor build up again for thousands of years.

[Images: Top, Wikimedia Commons; Bottom: Rosetta Project]

Follow Matthew Battles on Twitter, or follow @fastcompany.