• Project MUSE – Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950 (review)

  Reread this great review of my 1995 book the other day; had to bookmark it, even if I am tooting my own horn here!
  QUOTE
  Inside the deliberately circumscribed limitations of her topic, Yule Heibel makes a profoundly sophisticated contribution to scholarship on post-World War II art history. Concentrating on German artists’ and critics’ efforts to reestablish viable cultural practices, she turns her evaluation of the relatively minor painter Nay into a discussion that has implications for a great range of visual art produced after 1945.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: johanna_drucker reconstructing_the_subject yule_heibel

• DRM in Cars Will Drive Consumers Crazy | Electronic Frontier Foundation

  This is frightening. A car where you have to rent the battery (i.e., you don’t own the whole vehicle), and if you let your contract lapse, it stops working?
  QUOTE
  As our friends at iFixit say, if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it. Users need the right to repair the things they buy, and that is incompatible with blanket restrictions on circumventing DRM.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: drm eff

• By 2017, your smartphone will be smarter than you | SmartPlanet

  Creepy. (Reading about this while reading Dave Eggers’s The Circle just makes me want to hurl…)
  QUOTE
  By adding an array of features to mobile devices including GPS trackers, cameras, apps and sensors that can improve and record our daily lives and browsing habits, the addition of personal cloud computing gives applications the opportunity to acquire knowledge over time and predict what we need and want in real-time.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: smartplanet smartphones ubiquity tracking dystopia silicon_valley

• Indoor Location Technology Uses Wi-Fi to Track Shoppers | MIT Technology Review

  This is the stuff that Evgeny Morozov RIGHTLY would call creepy…
  QUOTE
  You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.

  Convenient? Certainly. Creepy? Maybe.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: tracking mit_techreview retail shopping big_data privacy

• A City With No Children – Kaid Benfield – The Atlantic Cities

  Sad state of affairs:
  QUOTE
  Saratoga Springs in New York made national news some years ago when a middle school refused to admit a student who, on national Bike to Work day, bicycled to school with his mom. On the other side of the country, Laguna Beach’s schools declined to join the other 425 in California who participated in Walk to School Day in 2010 because walking to school, the decision-makers determined, was inherently unsafe, no matter how coordinated and supervised.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: atlantic_cities kaid_benfield childhood traffic cities

• Saudi Bike by Nicole Gelinas – City Journal

  QUOTE
  Girls don’t ride bikes, Wadjda hears repeatedly from her mother and her (all-female) teachers. Such a ban isn’t superfluous from the point of view of controlling society; one feels independent and in charge when pedaling a bicycle, a state of mind that an authoritarian government frowns upon. But as Wadjda secretly practices her balance on Abdullah’s bike, she grows more determined to get one of her own. Her desire for spokes and wheels grows as she begins to realize everything else that girls and women aren’t permitted to do. She’s reaching the age where teachers want her to drape her face and hair on her way to school, lest she pose too much of a temptation to the catcalling men she meets along the way.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: nicole_gelinas city_journal saudi_arabia islam girls equality bicycles

• Complete Streets: It’s About More Than Just Bike Lanes

  Great video.
  QUOTE
  The truth is, no matter how hard some media outlets try to spin it otherwise, these new street safety projects have broad community support. And while the story of these changes often gets simplified in the press, the fact is that the benefits of the redesigns go far beyond cycling. A street with a protected bike lane also has less speeding, shorter pedestrian crossings, less lane-shifting and more predictable movements for drivers, and the opportunity to add more trees and plantings. Injuries to pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and car passengers drop wherever the new designs go in. And on the East Side, these improvements have been paired with dedicated bus-only lanes with camera enforcement, making service more convenient and attractive for thousands of bus riders.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: urbanism walkability vimeo

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 11|17|13 at 5:43 pm. Filed under: links.

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