Archive for 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Want To Know Where Your Bailout Dollars Are Going? Too Bad.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 29, 2009 by admin in Politics
Saturday, August 29th, 2009The Federal Reserve insists it’s none of your business which banks your tax dollars are bailing out.
Would you like to know which banks are getting the $23 Trillion bailouts you and your grandkids are paying for? TOO BAD. The Federal Reserve has insisted that Manhattan U.S. District Court Chief Judge Loretta Preska’s ruling in favor of Bloomberg News in a recent FOIA case would “would threaten the companies and the economy” adding that revealing the information “would stigmatize the banks and result in imminent competitive harm”. This is the second such case recently; Fox News lost one in July. Bet you didn’t know Fox cared so much about the common man, did you? Well, they apparently want to protect us from the evils of the BBC too. If you’ve been feeling better about the economy, we don’t want to dent your enthusiasm, but be aware that as of this writing, 81 more banks have failed this year, and from March to June the number of banks on the “Problem List” rose from 305 to 416. And all of this while banks repackage the same toxic investments that caused it all.
Finding Reality Boring? Augment It.
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 28, 2009 by admin in Technology
Friday, August 28th, 2009Reality is much more interesting when it’s all commented on and tagged like a Facebook status post or Flickr set.
Check Out The iPhone “Stalk Her” App |
We looked at the future of augmented reality back in April, but had no idea at the time that so many developers were on the verge of launching apps so soon. Acrossair has a cool app that tells Londoners where their nearest tube station is via their iPhone’s video function. RobotVision AR is a little more interesting; it integrates Bing local search, geotagged Flickr photos, and Twitter connections with an app that lets you simply point the camera in different directions to locate the shops, hotels, or tourist spots you’re looking for. The Austrian startup Mobilizy is developing AR driving directions with text-to-speech functionality called Wikitude Drive. They plan to include more “social navigation” features in future releases. Japanese company Tonchidot is introducing “airtagging” via their tool SekaiCamera. This is all incredibly cool stuff, but being the future-obsessed late adopter I am, I think I’ll hold out for the holographic version where life will be like one big “Pop Up Video”. Read the rest of this entry »
Living In America: It’s In Tents Lately
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, August 27th, 2009My righteous indignation is back, and it’s badder than ever.
We were worried about that whole Econopocalypse thing for a while, but not anymore. For starters, Timothy Geithner said in June that the economy’s okay, and Ben Bernanke still says so this month. So why are several of my most intelligent, hardworking friends unemployed? And why are Americans living in tents? In spite of rather shocking numbers on unemployment, homelessness, and poverty assembled by The Centre for Research on Globalization, the popular media in this country continues to do a fantastic job of making things seem fine. Even the global headquarters for weepy liberal extremism otherwise known as the Huffington Post plays down the “Tent City” phenomena, claiming accuracy in reporting because they asked their readers to share stories about about tent cities in their towns across America, forgetting that the only people that actually read Huffington Post are liberal elitist media types living in gated communities, or people that got Rickolled into it. I had misplaced my righteous indignation briefly, but all of this is bringing it back. Especially when you consider the fact that all the legislators in DC battling to ultimately deny us healthcare already have theirs, and WE pay for 75% of it. This all creates an amusing and perhaps comforting paradox: If you’re jobless, homeless, and have no insurance, you can’t call in sick and stay home for a day, and even if you could, you’d never get well, so you could never return to work anyway.
Air Guitar, Karaoke, And Why People Hate Mimes
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 26, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009How to get attention for still not doing something you can’t do.
 Günther Love Understands That Sometimes The Package Is The Only Thing That Matters |
As someone who actually likes doing things that I can actually do, I’ve always been a little perplexed by people who can’t do things pretending they are. All the same, I was disappointed that it somehow escaped my attention that the Air Guitar World Championship finals took place the other day, and that they crowned the new champion, French native Sylvain “Günther Love” Quimene. To be perfectly honest, although I had heard of air guitar competitions a few years ago, I had no idea just how big they had become. This year’s winner performed before an audience of more than 5,000 people from 20 countries, and has received international press. If you’re kicking yourself for not having your act together yet again this year, don’t (ahem) fret, learn more about the profession by reading Björn Türoque’s (say that out loud) To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist
Your Facebook & Twitter Activity Is Tracked More Closely Than You Think
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 25, 2009 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Sentiment Analysis & Social Media Monitoring are compiling massive amounts of data for trend tracking, but as a side effect, compile massive amounts of data about individuals as well.
Next time you’re Twittering your thoughts, making a status post, or taking a quiz on Facebook, remember that not only are you creating part of an eternal online identity and probably sharing your information with more people than you thought (especially see question 3 in that ACLU quiz), you’re also helping shape marketing and political decisions. We’ve written jokingly about Googlewanking and Googlewashing before, but the two latest big things on the web – Social Media Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis – are making the web a different place. On the abstractly interesting side of this, sentiment analysis sort of renders the typical CNN or Time user poll (typically called a Voodoo Poll) even more absurd than they were. Online polls have always had major shortcomings, but the main one was that of limited demographic diversity, i.e.: only dorks who take CNN polls take CNN polls. A recent classic example of their susceptibility to gaming and inaccuracy was when “moot”, the 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, became the “World’s Most Influential Person” in a Time user poll. The difference with these newly evolving data mining tools is that they Read the rest of this entry »