A report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%.
But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says.
Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was “overwhelming” and its consequences “disastrous”.
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
libavg is a very interesting package for multimedia installations:
libavg is a high-level multimedia platform with a focus on interactive installations. It is meant to pick up where Macromedia Director leaves off and gives you high-quality hardware-accelerated visuals as well as easy and flexible authoring, testing and deployment. libavg integrates well with other open-source solutions for sound, networking and hardware device support, resulting in a complete and well-integrated package. It uses an xml-based layout language for screen design and python as scripting language.
libavg aims to replace Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director with following design goals: high-quality visuals, high-quality sound, quick authoring, support for a broad range of systems and openness for expansion (see also the features page for details).
And best of all: it uses Python, which is a clean, simple, fast and easy to learn object-oriented scripting language.
Disregarding the legal issues with copyrighted material on YouTubes and Google Video servers (I can’t check those as a regular user), there are some clips where I am simply glad that they are available online, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see them: documentaries, political commentaries and satire.
Just some examples:
- Commentary: Olbermann on the Murder of Habeus Corpus
- Report: Clinton interviewed by FoxNews
- Keith Olberman comments on the Clinton interview
- Satire: Stephen Colbert at the White House correspondents dinner
- Satire: Keith Olbermann interviewed by Stephen Colbert
- Documentary: Trues and Lies of 9-11 (Lecture from Nov’01)
- Documentary: From Freedom to Fascism
- Documentary: The Oil Factor: Behind the war on terror
- Documentary Peak Oil: A summary
And there is a lot of similar examples of material available.
Here is a very detailed article about concurrent products for the Apple iPod called “iPod Killers for Christmas 2006” (and an older one for Summer 2006).
And I think to some extent the article exhibits, why all those vendors remain unsuccsessful to decrease the market share of the iPod. It is not a question of the style of the object. Even the feature set will not do it. The secret to the success of the iPod is a) it’s simplicity and b) iTunes (and to some degree the iTunes Store). There is practically no simpler way to manage the content of your MP3 Player than to let iTunes handle the files on your iPod for you.
Without iTunes no one would really much about the iPod. The other MP3 Players may look slick – but the more important question is what kind of tricks you need to do to get the desired music on that thingy. And Apple did understand this since the 1st generation iPod: Apple did not design only a product – they designed a whole product system, where everything related to digital music can be managed absolutley stress free.
And this is such an important selling argument that people even tend to ignore the fact, that Apple cages them in that system: no songs bought on iTunes play on these “iPod killers” because those do not support the DRM Apple is using to protect the copyrights (not to mention that you can’t change crippled batteries). If you can do anything you want within that system already you will rarely touch its border and find something you want to do but can’t.
One of the important things you need to work out as a design educator is what you will give out as first assignment in a seminar or project. It is like a warm-up for a project, something that helps you to move into the problem domain quickly.
Of course there is usually plenty of material to research, collect and talk about almost everytime — but while these things help with orientation in the subject matter, it does have the tendency to cast a damp over experimentation and form-giving.
So in early assigments I seek to propose a task that is technically easy to do on the one hand (in terms of tools you need). I think there are two types of early assignments:
- a practical task that does not require much investigation and yet again is complex in regard to the possible solutions
- a research task that only involves observation and critical thinking
The goal is to help students to make an observation they didn’t expect or did not yet think about and to encourage them to use creative “out-of-bounds” thinking. At the same time it is desired that the extent of the “larger” design problem unfolds as well as all options available to solve it.
If you every have studied design – do you remember any the early assignments you got to get you in that loop?
My German weblog [RSS-Feed] now has a new URL. I aligned its design to this English blog here. The German site is build on WordPress – this blog here is a mix of Tinderbox for editing and Zope on the server.
I had a phone conversation with a friend who works in a planning department of one of the largest corporations in the world. We were discussing the experiences of many employees in large organisations (she is a fan of Dilbert therefore).
I was reminded of the »Design and organisations« seminar I did five years ago. I love to browse the accompanying weblog once in a while. Everytime I do, I am confident, that I will offer another seminar like this one day. I still think that there is a huge potential for designers to work on “inhouse communication”. Many corporations employ designers only when it comes to communication with outsiders – mostly customers. Many don’t sense a strategic possibility for design when communicating to their own employees. Ironically – whenever I talk about that with people – most people agree that inhouse communication is an issue.
Dave Pollard wrote a fabulous and brilliant post last year about the psychology of information and why people often do not share information within an organisation. Designers really have (or should have) the skills to implement and operationalize many of the “effective workarounds” he proposes.
There were rumors around about Goolge bying YouTube for $1,65 billion. Now the YouTube founders themselves posted a small video announcing the deal:
Like this guy I think it will be a extremely interesting question how Google will deal with the copyright violations in the end.
Update: Something doesn’t just feel right about these guys and this deal. They don’t really have a message and bloviate something about community service. Do you think it is right that tehy just earned 1,65 billion for delivering content they didn’t produce over bandwidth they didn’t pay for? I think Goolge just wanted to make sure to get control over YouTube before it’s getting even more expensive.
Update 2: Here is a public debate between a law professor and an economics professor about the copyright issues related to the YouTube aquisition.