Life on Earth
- On the Safety of Firefighters: Real Time Danger During the Jesusita Blaze and Human Lives vs. Expensive Homes. By Ray Ford in The Independent. An excellent report by Ray on a wildfire that took more than 80 homes, burned across the face of the Santa Ynez mountains above Santa Barbara, and was the second fire in a short time (the first was the Tea Fire) to come within half a mile of our own home there.
- Oceans Storing Earth’s Excess Heat in Leaked UN Report. By Alex Morales in Bloomberg. Fun to think of all that heat being stored in a report. 🙂
Journalism
- Storyful and the open newsroom: Journalism gets better when more people do it. By Mathew Ingram in Gigaom.
- Blast from the past: This from Bruce Sterling in 2007, responding to some things I said.
Flying
- In pictures: Onboard meals go flying as plane hits turbulence. By CNN.Related: What you should know before your next flight. “Ever worry about someone opening an aircraft door at 30,000 feet? A robust Reddit thread addresses that and other inside airline wisdom.” By Dominique Van Heerden.
- Brace yourself: Transatlantic flights set to be bumpier, costlier. By Qin Xie and Chuck Thompson, CNN. Source: The importance of the diurnal and annual cycle of air traffic for contrail radiative forcing, by Nicola Stuber1, Piers Forster1,2, Gaby Rädel1 & Keith Shine1 in Nature.
Surveillance
- Forget “post-PC”—pervasive computing and cloud will change the nature of IT: In the next five years, mobile tech and analytics will change how we work. By Sean Gallagher in Ars Technica. Also in Ars, The body worn “IMSI catcher” for all your covert phone snooping needs: Other next-gen devices locate and decrypt mobile phone calls in real time. By Dan Goodin.
- Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s. By Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan in The New York Times.
Tech +/vs. Politics
- Caught in a time Before Wi-Fi Was Free. By Ann Kadet in The Wall Street Journal.
- How Much Is A User Worth? By Tristan Louis.
- Data Driven: New Program to Fix New York City Streets. By Ted Mann in The Wall Street Journal.
- What Happens When a Man Takes on the Feds. A Weekend Interview with Craig Zucker, by Sohrab Ahmari, in The Wall Street Journal. This is the tragic story of Buckyballs. (Follow that link.) We have some here. They are one of the greatest inventions ever, imho. Wonderful things.
- As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama: I voted for Obama reluctantly, but never did I imagine he would become another Richard Nixon. By Jeff Jarvis in theguardian.com.
Biz
- News Corp Works To Replace Ad Nets’ ‘Undercutting’ With Global Private Exchange. By David Kaplan in Ad Exchanger.
- Staples.com rips off poor people; let’s take control of our online personas. By Cathy O’Neil, mathbabe.
- Competing in the Age of Omnichannel Retailing. By Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Jeffrey Hu and Mohammad S. Rahman in MIT Sloan Management Review. Summary: “Recent technology advances in mobile computing and augmented reality are blurring the boundaries between traditional and Internet retailing, enabling retailers to interact with consumers through multiple touch points and expose them to a rich blend of offline sensory information and online content. Retailers and their supply-chain partners will need to rethink their competitive strategies.
- Major Torrent Site TheBox.bz calls it quits. In Torrent Freak. Pull-quote: “There can be little doubt that the hostile climate referenced by TheBox can be traced back to actions being planned by City of London Police, the Federation Against Copyright Theft, the UK Premier League, plus other local groups such as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television. Right now a dark cloud is hanging over many sites and nobody has much of any idea what will happen next.”
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