CL!CK is a short film made by Lego about how Legos can inspire you to come up with great ideas. It’s a fancy ad, to be sure, but a truly lovely one. [YouTube via NotCot]
Author: Serkadis
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Experts Divided On Implications Of Brutal Cold Spell, RedOrbit.com
Article Tags: World Temperatures
This year’s fierce winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the beginning of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last decades, say some of the world’s most renowned climate scientists. However, other experts say the cold spell does not contradict an overall trend of global warming.
A report on Sunday by the British newspaper The Mail cited forecasts by eminent climate scientists that are a direct challenge to some of the most deeply held beliefs among those who say the world is experiencing global warming – including claims that the North Pole will be ice-free by the summer of 2013.
The climate scientists questioning such predictions of global warming based their predictions of a “mini ice-age” on analysis of natural water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Indeed, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, summer Arctic sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, roughly 26 percent, since 2007 – a figure that even the most ardent global warming believers do not dispute.
Source: redorbit.com
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Design Studio-Center for the Study of Vietnamese Architecture
Here it is, the studio has start for more than a week and is going well. We are in a process of condensing research. Lots of thought and time have been put out in trying to know the Vietnamese culture and its architecture.
Project Description: The project for the studio will be a Center for the Study of Vietnamese Architecture. It will have two components. The 1st will be a research archive, library, and a study center for the scholars, along with associated support facilities. The 2nd will be a study abroad center for foreign design students. It will include design studio space, a small computer lab, a review space, an apartment for the visiting supervising faculty, and associated support spaces. The site for the Center is in central HCM-Sai Gon city, in an area heavily influenced by the French colonial presence in Viet Nam, and near a variety of sites of historic significance.
The programmes of this Center are subject to be changed as we have not had an open discussion of what will actually go in there yet, and that discussion is coming up next week.
This is the overall schedule of our studio, it will be readjust throughout the term as we progress
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“Dexter” Star Michael C. Hall Cancer Diagnosis
Dexter star Michael C. Hall has confirmed that he is being treated for cancer.
In a statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday, the celebrity said he was fortunate to be diagnosed with a “treatable and curable condition,” Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and thanked his doctors and nurses for their expertise. The name of the Los Angeles area health facility where Hall is undergoing treatment has not been released.
Craig Bankley, spokesperson for the star, tells the newswire that Michael’s cancer is in complete remission and his treatment is ongoing.
The acto is expected to appear at this Sunday’s Golden Globes Awards in Los Angeles, where he is nominated for his role as serial kille Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s hit series Dexter. Bankey confirmed that Hall is expected to return for production on the drama’s fifth season later this year.
Best wishes to Michael…..
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Recompute cardboard computer enters production, fails to fool anybody
What a wrongheaded, quixotic, and yet opportunistic and callous idea. A cardboard PC. Now, they’re launching a product I was careful to denounce several months ago, and all my objections still apply. Take a moment to read why a cardboard PC is just the epitome of foolishness, or just glance over these handy bullet points:- Corrugated cardboard will retain heat, limiting life of parts
- Corrugations will become clogged with dust, exacerbating insulation effect
- Cardboard is fragile, absorbent, and impossible to repair
- Expandability is very limited
- Only one 2.5″ HDD bay and it’s stuffed into the cardboard – obviously a heat risk
- The “limited to bare bones” is the same as almost any other computer
- Hello, cardboard is flammable, and parts of your computer get hot enough to burn things
- The case is perhaps the only part of a computer you don’t need to throw away, ever
- Would you buy a computer from people who misspelled power supply, ventilation, through, perimeter, and call RAM “RAM memory,” all on their spec page — a solitary JPEG?
The thing is, these guys have to know this stuff. They couldn’t design a case without knowing something about all this, but they’re doing it anyway. It’s a very disingenuous statement, and one that’s open to misinterpretation. “Now your computer is disposable!” That’s what people will take away from this. If they’re serious about this, these guys should be applying their green sensibilities and engineering experience elsewhere. If they’re just cashing in on the fact that green sells right now, then I we can just put them in the pile with Asus, whose transparently un-green “bamboo laptop” creates only the thinnest veneer of ecological awareness.
Look, I’m all for making things greener. But putting a cardboard shell around a bunch of toxic metal and plastic and calling it eco-friendly is bullshit of the highest order. We need to focus on consumer education so people don’t throw out entire PCs. People should know what they were buying, how to upgrade their computer or keep it working, or how to keep it in use after they buy a new one (home media server, anybody). This unbelievably inadequate band-aid (if we can even call it that) is the exact opposite of what needs to happen.
[Recompute, via The Next Web]
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Someone obviously wants the crowd-developed Cable Caps, but I don’t
Wait, before you write these things off, hear me out. Cable Caps are actually kind of cool in a quirky sort of way. They are cable organizers that are designed to protect the mail ends of USB cables, while also keeping the cables neatly wrapped and organized. Neat, eh? The only thing is that the product is just a few years late for most people.
The thought here is that you probably have multiple cables laying around, each with a different purpose. You might have a cable for your phone, camera, printer, webcam, external hard drive, and so one. Some people might, but the only cables on my desk right now are 6-inch mini USB and micro USB. Both of them handle everything, but a few years ago that wasn’t the case. Everything had it’s own proprietary cable.And I have never once had the male end of a USB cable damaged. But still, somewhere out there, there might be people that actually use these things.
The real story here is that the product was the 22 product designed and developed by the Quirky community. This is the same Internet collaboration that brought the world the Split Stick and DigiDudes and the iPod nano case, the Kickster. Cable Caps are currently in the pre-order stage, with 82 orders placed out of a need 450 for them to be made. The Kickster is still in the same boat with only 118 orders placed out of a needed 300.
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Remote Control your phone with “I left my phone at home”
Click for larger version
Most of us are never more than a metre away from our phones, which makes forgetting it at home even more disastrous. I Left My Phone At Home is insurance just for that day.
I Left My Phone At Home is an application that runs on your Windows® Mobile phone that lets you see and respond to your missed phone calls and text messages when you are away from your phone.
The application lets you:
- Track ALL your missed calls and text messages, even if you’re not at your phone.
- Respond to all your calls and text messages by simply typing a response.
- Set an away message to be sent to all missed calls and text messages, automatically!
- See your upcoming appointments so you don’t miss important meetings!
- Never miss that important call, text message, or meeting again!
The innovative software is just $4.99 and available from Marketplace here.
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How Many Questionable Assumptions Can You Layer On Top Of Each Other To Estimate Bogus ‘Losses’ From Unauthorized iPhone App Downloads?
A while back someone had sent me to a website I’d never heard of called 24/7 Wall St. that had a post claiming how much certain top blogs were “worth.” The reason someone pointed me to it was because it had Techdirt in the list. What was amusing was that whoever wrote the article made a bunch of assumptions and every single one of them was wrong — and some of them could have been checked with a simple look at our website. Given that every single assumption was wrong, the conclusion was equally laughable. I actually emailed them to point out a few factual errors in the post — none of which were corrected. Since then I tend not to trust anything from that site — though it has a habit of getting attention for similarly ridiculous “estimates,” and people repeat them as if they were factual.
Allison K was the first of a whole bunch of you to send in the fact that the site is trying to “estimate” the “impact of piracy” of iPhone apps on Apple and app developers. While I commend the site on at least explaining its methodology, the more you read it, the more ridiculous it becomes. They simply layer questionable assumption upon questionable assumption upon questionable assumption, and when they get stuck, they pull out a random number. It’s almost comical to read. As Allison noted, it reminds her of xkcd’s famous comic of the Drake Equation, where one of the variables in the formula is defined as “Amount of bullshit you’re willing to buy from Frank Drake”:
It’s nice to have some sort of concrete numbers, because people like to have numbers to discuss. But when they’re based on so many layers of questionable assumptions, they tend to do a lot more harm than good. People will assume there’s some real basis for them when there is not.And, of course, as everyone should understand by now there’s no such thing as “losses” from unauthorized access. There is only a failure on the part of the company to convince people to buy. There is no line in their financial reports on “losses” from such activities — with good reason. The only issue is a business model issue, which is that the company has not given users a good enough reason to buy, so they chose to get the product elsewhere.
Update: And it gets more ridiculous. 24/7’s response was a comment below that did not address any of the concerns but simply says that I must not have made it through my high school math class. Classy. Meanwhile, Dark Helmet points us to TUAW’s takedown of the numbers, where they note that based on the assumptions, 24/7 appears to be assuming that there are 510 pirated apps per device. Uh. Yeah. Check those assumptions, folks.
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EA Sports Surveys Consumers About Potential Negative Tiger Impact
After EA Sports announced that it would be sticking by Tiger Woods and president Peter Moore reaffirmed that in a blog post earlier this month, it seemed pretty clear that Tiger was not in danger of losing his videogame endorsement deal. But at the very least, EA Sports seems to be investigating whether that decision is doing their brand any harm by way of a survey from Greenfield Online.
Among the Tiger-related questions in the survey are the following two (both pictured at Kotaku):
Q. EA Sports makes a Tiger Woods video game. Has the controversy made your impressions of EA Sports more or less favorable, or has it had no impact?
Q. Has the controversy made you more or less likely to buy a Tiger Woods related video game in the future?
Clearly, there is at least some modicum of concern that the Tiger scandal could reflect poorly on EA Sports. With Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online’s open beta launching later this month, it’s undoubtedly far too late to simply pull Tiger’s name off of it. But if the polling comes back overly negative, EA Sports might have to rethink its continued support of Tiger.
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Is the US increasingly a nation of psychoses?
Modern society, with its emphasis on material possessions and indifference to community, is making us mentally ill. It’s an argument that wouldn’t seem out of place on the Sunday talk shows, but in this case, it’s appearing in the academic journal Clinical Psychology Review, and the argument is backed by decades of data and a cognitive model that attempts to make sense of the process. The data suggests that there has been an increase in a standard measure of mental problems among individuals in their late teens and early 20s, and that the trend dates back at least to the 1930s.
The authors mention that a variety of studies have found mixed results when examining the time course of mental health within the US. Some of the studies that have attempted to address this problem have attempted to extrapolate trends using surveys of people in different age groups, but these studies suffer from two problems: mental health doesn’t remain static during an individual’s lifetime, and those with serious mental disabilities (such as clinical depression) tend to die younger than their peers.
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Rain Design’s iMac turntable sends the iMac for a spin
Filed under: Accessories, Cool tools, Odds and ends, iMac
iMacs are great, except when you have one sitting with its back to a wall and you need to plug something into the back of it. Particularly with the larger models, you end up having to pick up the iMac and swing it around to get to those ports on the back. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you could just spin it?That’s the idea behind the Rain Design i360, a turntable that encloses the base of an iMac or Apple Cinema Display, and then allows easy movement of the display. Want to show a co-worker on the “back” side of your iMac something? Just spin the entire computer around. Need to plug or unplug something? No problem — just swing the iMac or Cinema Display around and do it.
I’ve had an i360 on my first-generation Intel iMac since just after I bought it, and I can’t count the number of times that it has saved me from having to pick up the computer and slide it around to plug something in. I’ve recommended the i360 to many of my Mac consulting customers who have iMacs or Cinema Displays, and many of them end up buying the device.
The i360 base has a bit of weight to it so it doesn’t move, and there are rubber feet on the bottom to insure that your desktop isn’t scratched. The computer or display base is held in place with a single screw, so installation is simple. The manufacturer’s teardrop logo cutout (seen above) has a clear plastic window, so you can put a picture or logo into it just for fun.There are now two models of the i360. The original, available for US$39.90, works with the 20″ and 21.5″ aluminum iMacs, the 15″, 17″ and 20″ “plastic” G5 and Intel iMacs, and the 20″ and 23″ Cinema Display. To match the iMac you own, the base of the i360 comes in either painted white or in bare aluminum. The new model (US$44.90), called the i360 24″, fits the 24″ and 27″ aluminum iMacs and the 24″ Cinema Display. Alas, there is no i360 for the 30″ Cinema Display.
The i360 has served me well over the years, and it surprised me to find that TUAW hadn’t reported on this cool piece of hardware before. If you find your iMac sitting in the wrong direction often, it might be worth getting one and taking it for a spin.
TUAWRain Design’s iMac turntable sends the iMac for a spin originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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How good and idea would it be for SACU to be a Federation
Indeed it is long overdue. The Southern African Customs Union could be transformed from the oldest customs union in the world to be a strong Confederation of independent states with a unified economy, open borders, single currency. This indeed could be easily achieved since these 5 nation’s economies are integrated to a certain degree. With a population of about 51,055,878 people, a GDP of $541 billion and GDP per capita of $10, 000, this region will be the strongest Federal government in the whole of Africa in the economic sense. Moreover with a common English language and mostly similar cultures, conflict is something unlikely to occur. The big advantage is the huge number of good universities, well developed and maintained infrastructure, the exponentially growing educated population, well established mining industries etc it can perform to and beyond the levels of economies like South Korea.SACU is 100 years old today and has been consistent in the agreements that were made when the Union of South Africa was formed. After all the countries South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia have historical attachments from back in 1910 when they were Union of South Africa, Bechuanaland Protectorate, Basutholand, Swaziland and Suid Wes Afrika respectively.
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Chicago Service Organization Deeply Concerned for Employees and Clients in Haiti
The Children’s Place Association Serves Children and Families Affected by HIV in Haiti
The Children’s Place Association, a Chicago-based nonprofit, continues to monitor the situation in Haiti after at 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the country late Tuesday afternoon and the status of clients and workers remains unknown.The organization currently cares for more than 500 clients in Haiti.
The Children’s Place Association began programming in this poverty-ridden country to help families affected by HIV/AIDS meet the needs of their children.
“We have been attempting to contact our field workers in Haiti since we learned of the quake yesterday afternoon,” said Cathy Krieger, president and CEO of The Children’s Place Association.
“At this time we have not been able to reach our team or families and we are deeply concerned for their safety and well-being as the devastation in the area is wide spread.”
A relief effort is already underway.
“We have begun to mobilize support for our employees and clients. While we do not yet know what the specific needs, monetary donations will help us to quickly provide aid once we are able to reach them. We anticipate these needs will include medical supplies, clean water and food.”
Donations can be made through the organizations Web site, childrens-place.org, or calling 312-660-3030.
Supporters are asked to note the donation is for Haiti Quake Relief.
About The Children’s Place Association
The mission of The Children’s Place Association is to improve the present and secure the future for children, youth and families confronted by HIV/AIDS or other life-changing health conditions.
Founded in 1991, The Children’s Place Association serves as a safe haven for children in Chicago whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS through the Residential Center and Early Learning Center as well as Family & Community Services and Foster Care & Adoption programs.
Children’s Place International was launched to care for the 2.5 million children worldwide living with HIV. Currently the program serves children and families in Haiti, and programming is under development in Guyana.
For more information on programs and services, visit childrens-place.org or call 312-733-9954.
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SNIT – Sistema Nacional de Informação Territorial
Pessoal neste site podem consultar de forma rapida os PDM’s e PP’s de todo o lado :yes: -
Autodelta takes on the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione
Filed under: Aftermarket, Coupe, Performance, Misc. Auto Shows, Alfa Romeo, UK
As far as Alfa Romeos go, the 8C Competizione is as exotic as they come. Still, some are looking for more. Originally, rumors surfaced that Alfa was working on a lightweight GTA version, but while we wait for that to pan out, Alfa tuner par excellence Autodelta is working on tuning the svelte supercar themselves.
Few details are known at this point, but a remapped ECU should squeeze out a modest 17 horsepower boost from the stock 444-hp, 4.7-liter Ferrari-developed V8. Autodelta is also working on fine-tuning the chassis, taking their 8C around some of the finest tracks in Europe to get it just right.
The result is slated to be unveiled at the Pistonheads Performance Car Show in Birmingham later this week, so stay tuned, and follow the jump for the press release in the meantime.
[Source: Autodelta]
Continue reading Autodelta takes on the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione
Autodelta takes on the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you were into bestiality, what would be your animal of choice?
The flamboyant flamingo would be my choice, obviously. That or a shaved monkey (closest to human experience, probably) – although if you are going for a monkey, you would probably want the whole monkey experience. Discuss!Thread idea royalties go to Octoman, by the way.
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Haiti earthquake triggers $1M in mobile donations, 1,500 Facebook updates a minute
At a time when there are few news organizations with the capital to put reporters on the ground in Haiti, social media is helping to fill the gap with information and financial relief for victims of the earthquake.
- More than $1,000,000 has been raised so far through the Red Cross’ mobile donation program, according to Jared Cohen, who is on the State Department’s policy planning staff. The Red Cross started a program today, allowing the public to donate $10 by texting “Haiti” to 90999. Music artist Wyclef Jean is also running a mobile donation campaign for his charity Yele. If you text ‘Yele’ to 501 501, $5 dollars will be donated. Both programs automatically add the charges to your cellphone bill.
- 1,500 status updates a minute mentioning “Haiti” are running through Facebook, according to Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications.
- Haiti URLs have seen a 1578% increase in traffic and a 5407% jump in bandwidth usage, according to Zscaler, a cloud-based security service for web traffic.
A number of citizen journalism projects are providing news and media from the ground. Global Voices, a non-profit blog aggregator for international news, has created Twitter lists of people on the ground in Haiti. So has The New York Times. The Boston Globe’s Big Picture also has a truly heart-wrenching collection of photos, which is where the top picture comes from.
Ushahidi, a non-profit project that uses mobile phones to crowdsource news and information in times of crisis, started up a Haiti site where hospitals can show what services they offer and people can post messages to search for family or friends.
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Visible Technologies secures $22M for social monitoring
Bellevue, Wash. startup Visible Technologies announced it has raised $22 million in a fourth round of funding. The investment surely shows significant growth potential for social and digital media monitoring companies. It also suggests that big companies and brands might be starting to take out their wallets.The ability to provide companies and brands with a way to monitor and measure is the stepping stone for them to take the leap of faith into social and digital media. While they may know that customers are having “conversations” about them, they want to make sure they have a good beat on who, what, where and when before they develop a presence on, say Twitter or Facebook.
Visible Technologies claims to have a strong data set in its TruCast platform, revolving around a listen, learn, engage and protect motto. The platform includes several additional solutions. TruPulse, an RSS feed web app, lets users listen to real-time discussions and determine influencers and activists. TruVoice, a set of response apps, allows the user to develop responses to any online conversations without having to leave the Visible Technologies platform. Finally, TruReputation is a set of services that helps you to maximize the positive information about your brand so it’s found by web searches.
Other social monitoring companies are working to strengthen their data sets as well. Yesterday, we saw two social monitoring companies Trendrr and Klout decide to share data to help strengthen each other’s platforms for users to better track trends and determine key influencers on the social web. Companies like Radian6 or Buzzlogic do the same type of analytic analysis and have similar solutions.
The funding was led by new investor Investor Growth Capital (IGC) and existing investors Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP. Financing will be used to strengthen it’s technology platform, discover news uses and expand into international markets. Added to a previous third round, Visibles Technologies now has a total of $34 million.
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Mobile app analytics firm guesstimates Nexus One hasn’t sold like hotcakes
Maybe we’re oversimplifying here, but we never really got the impression that Google was intending to blow out the launch of the Nexus One. Sure, you could argue that seeding the phones to employees ahead of the announcement was an effort to build buzz — but it didn’t really make any attempt to capitalize on the move, and last week’s subdued press conference in Mountain View (sans the holy trinity of Eric, Larry, and Sergey) wasn’t the wild, crazy event it could’ve been had Google wanted it to be. That’s why we’re not particularly surprised to see that the app analytics peeps over at Flurry are estimating (based on usage of the apps that it instruments) that just 20,000 Nexus Ones were sold in the first week of retail — a far cry from its 250,000 figure for the Droid, much less the iPhone 3GS’ staggering 1.6 million. As Flurry notes, Verizon pumped (and continues to pump) millions upon millions of dollars into advertising the Droid in print, television, and the web; that alone boosted broad consumer interest, something Google earned to a far lesser extent through media coverage alone. Furthermore, the Droid instantly relieved much of the “if only the iPhone were on Verizon” pressure that had been building over the prior year, whereas the Nexus One brought nothing fundamentally new to the table for T-Mobile — and many folks on other networks either won’t or simply can’t switch to the number four carrier for business or coverage reasons. The bottom line is that we suspect Google isn’t sweating the Nexus One’s sales figures one bit, no matter how high or low they may be; whether that’s a smart strategy for Android as a platform in the long term, though, remains to be seen.
Mobile app analytics firm guesstimates Nexus One hasn’t sold like hotcakes originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Segway Inc. bought by Segway UK?
This one has been flying under the radar for the past day or so, but talk is starting to heat up on some forums that Segway Inc. has effectively been bought out by one of its own dealerships. That initial word seems to have come from a Segway Inc. shareholder, who says he recently received a stockholder letter informing him that Segway Inc. would be “merging” with JWH Holdings, which is apparently a company formed by Segway UK simply for the purpose of this merger. What’s more, while the deal is apparently being called a merger, the letter itself reportedly confirms that it’s more of a complete buyout, with current CEO Jim Norrod supposedly set to be replaced by Tricia Laidler, and Segway UK’s Wayne Mitchell stepping up to be the new COO. Still nothing in the way of official statements from either party just yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything one way or the other.
[Thanks, Ed J]
Segway Inc. bought by Segway UK? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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