Month: February 2012

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel, Steal It: An Urban Planning Award for Cities That Copy

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel, Steal It: An Urban Planning Award for Cities That Copy:

Cities around the world may all be struggling with the same problems, from building affordable housing to boosting internet access, but a lack of dialogue means that local governments rarely copy each other’s successful ideas.  The world’s “567,000 mayors are reinventing the wheel, every single one of them with everything” they do, says Sascha Havemeyer, general director of Living Labs Global, a Copenhagen-based non-profit that encourages collaboration among the world’s cities.

Part of the problem is political pressure to contract with local businesses only, which makes it hard for city governments to look to outsiders for advice and solutions. “The logic behind that is it helps local companies grow,” says Havemeyer, but it can cost up to fifty times as much to recreate a product or service instead of importing it from elsewhere.

[I’m sure there are patterns books for cities considering software development borrowed the concept from architecture. The rest should be locally adjusted and built. atmo]

I have a bad feeling about this

I have a bad feeling about this – raganwald’s posterous:

Now in the next century, what does a somewhat battered and out-of-date protocol droid observe? That everything old is new again. The “intellectual property cartels” act like the hardware giants of old, buying politics by the pound and telling everyone who will listen that they need more protection for their patent portfolio, more protection for their cartoon characters, more protection for even the depiction of sporting events.

They tell us that only a “managed economy” for intellectual “property” will preserve jobs, and that ifthe serfs have more “freedom,” this will actually lead to slavery. The warn us that roving bands of pirates are living it up like drug barons on movie downloads. They explain how they need the senate to grant them special, temporary powers to download the contents of your phone or laptop when you cross the border, they explain why they need to send violent special forces police to arrest and extradite the owners of a file downloading business, they explain why they need to monitor the entire world’s tweets looking for jokes in poor taste.

And that’s just how they run politics. If you want to create the future, the possibility of successfully navigating a patent minefield is approximately 3,720 to 1. And I noticed earlier, the electoral motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to political innovation speed.

We are, I think, at the beginning of Act III. Some of you will agree with me that surrender is a perfectly acceptable alternative in extreme circumstances. But others will climb into their trusty ships and continue the fight, harassing and wounding the entrenched interests until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own corruption. The future of our economy really does depend on the rebels succeeding. At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy have been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies.
More jobs and businesses have been created by VCRs than destroyed by them. More jobs and businesses have been created by the breakup of AT&T than destroyed by it. More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk. More jobs and businesses have been created by the stagnation of Microsoft than lost in Redmond. And it will be the same with the RIAA, the MPAA, Intellectual Ventures, and everyone else scheming to enthral the people with digital “rights” management and criminal prosecution of “file sharing.” In the destruction of the monopolization of ideas, lie the seeds of a new revolution, one that will bring wealth, freedom, and jobs.

Rebels, the force will be with you. Always.

[Insightful.]

A Proposal for Penn Station and Madison Square Garden

A Proposal for Penn Station and Madison Square Garden:

The 1912 Post Office facade — also by McKim, Mead & White, with the “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom” inscription — will then become the face of Amtrak. That will restore a superficial measure of the dignity to railway travel that was lost in 1963 when the old Pennsylvania Station was torn down. But the experience for most people using the building will not be like the glory of moving through Grand Central or the old Penn Station. Aesthetically, a top-ranking state official confided to me in all seriousness, the Moynihan project aspires to be more like the Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station in Secaucus, N.J.

Years ago the critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted that at the turn of the last century the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, wanted to build a hotel atop Penn Station to exploit valuable air rights. But his architect, McKim, talked him out of it. The railroad owed the city a “thoroughly and distinctly monumental gateway,” McKim argued. Idealism temporarily triumphed over commerce, until McKim’s great building, across several troubled decades, became an increasingly rundown emblem of urban glory and gave way to an architecture of gloomy pragmatism and moneyed interests.

There is historic justice in trying to rectify a crime committed a half-century ago that galvanized the architectural preservation movement. “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat,” is the familiar lament from Vincent J. Scully Jr., the Yale architectural historian, about the difference between the former and present Penn Stations.

[the Rail Station in Secaucus is horrendous. A strange hard to navigate, joyless, gateway to NJ. Fitting since until recently that state has lacked any sort of integrity. But horrendous. If I have a vote… I’d move the Garden.]

All or something

All or something:

This is of course nothing new. We’ve been playing this bongo drum for years. But every time I see people crumble and quit from the crunch-mode pressure cooker, I think what a shame, it didn’t have to be like that. It’s the same when I read yet another story about someone who won the startup lottery, and the stereotypical startup role model is glorified and cemented again.

It’s almost like we need another word. Startup is a great one, but I feel like it’s been forever hijacked for this narrow style, and “starting a business” just doesn’t have the sex appeal. Any suggestions?

[I don’t have a suggestion, but I agree that it isn’t all or nothing.]

Apple’s iTunes Match: The First Royalties Are In

Apple’s iTunes Match (aka iMatch): The First Royalties Are In | TuneCorner Music Blog:

The music industry needs innovation. Services like iMatch, Spotify, Simfy, Deezer and others are bringing that innovation—it will take some time to learn which are the ones consumers want.  But in the interim, seeing an additional $10,000+ appear out of the thin air for TuneCore Artists by people just listening to songs they already own is amazing!

[Hmmm.]

23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?

23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health? – YouTube:

A Doctor-Professor answers the old question “What is the single best thing we can do for our health” in a completely new way.
Dr. Mike Evans is founder of the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital.

[Brilliantly executed. “Can you limit your sitting & sleeping to just 23 and ½ hours a day?”]

Source: Jim Roepcke

Don’t Forgive Path, the Creepy Company that Misled Us Once Already

Don’t Forgive Path, the Creepy Company that Misled Us Once Already:

Morin has been receiving backslaps on Twitter today from other industry insiders. Never mind that he only really apologized “if you were uncomfortable” and said Path would “continue to be transparent,” when Path’s prior lack of transparency is precisely the issue here.

No, what seems to count in Silicon Valley is that Morin has mastered the one-two step of breaking the rules to get ahead, claiming to be sorry when caught, and then charging ahead, often right back into another ethically shady area of behavior. It’s a move right out of Mark Zuckerberg’s playbook, or Airbnb’s, or Zynga’s.

Two-faced behavior like this is turning the tech business into an ethical cesspool. Or as Winer put it more than a year ago, “the tech industry is a virus.” If you’re comfortable in your affliction, by all means believe Morin and leave Path installed on your phone. If you’ve finally had enough, trash the thing. If protecting your privacy isn’t worth deleting the latest mobile check-in whatever, then it’s not worth much.

[And a big yuck in the general direction of unethical people, especially those who mask their unethical behavior with a veneer of apologia.]

Translucent, pliable material lights up your home and adds privacy, too

Lovell Residence modern kitchen

Translucent, pliable material lights up your home and adds privacy, too:

In the 1970s a new building material gained traction in the marketplace. This material had all of the advantages of a skylight while being superior to skylights in energy efficiency and structure. It’s no wonder that many architects started specifying Kalwall where the only option had been a glass or plastic product.

Kalwall, which was actually developed in the ’50s, is a fiberglass-reinforced translucent sandwich panel. Though initially used for commercial and institutional buildings, Kalwall has become increasing popular for homes. This is especially true for an entire, luminous ceiling or where light is desired but privacy must be maintained.

[I’ve loved this stuff for years. Little known outside of architectural circles, builders are shy to use it. Shame really. I could so do this to my kitchen… Modern kitchen design by San Francisco architect Quezada Architecture]

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining

Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone:

Since 2008, the rest of America has suffered a severe economic correction. Ordinary people everywhere long ago had to learn to cope with the equivalent of a lower bonus season. When the crash hit, regular people could not make up the difference through bailouts or zero-interest loans from the Fed or leveraged-up synthetic derivative schemes. They just had to deal with the fact that the economy sucked – and they adjusted.

This ought to have been true also on Wall Street, but in a curious development that is somehow not addressed in Sherman’s piece, the financial services industry somehow managed to maintain its extravagant lifestyle standards in the middle of a historic global economic crash that, incidentally, they themselves caused.

After suffering one truly bad year – 2008, in which the securities industry collectively lost over $42 billion – Wall Street immediately rebounded to post record revenues in 2009, despite the fact that the economy at large did nothing of the sort. The numbers were so huge on Wall Street compared to the rest of the world that Goldman slashed its 4th-quarter bonuses, just so that the final bonus/comp number ($16.2 billion, down from what would have been $21 billion) didn’t look so garish to the rest of broke America.

What Sherman now argues is that Dodd-Frank has so completely hindered Wall Street’s ability to magically invent profits through borrowing and gambling that, unlike those wonderful days in 2009, its fortunes are now reduced to rising and falling – heaven forbid – along with the rest of the economy. Things are so bad, his interview subjects argue, that one is now more likely to make big money going into an actual business that makes an actual product:

“If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.”

[Oh dear. You can’t make this stuff up…]