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What Do Presidential Libraries Say About Their Namesakes' Legacies?
21 November 2009
Part of the point of a presidential library is that it's a monument to a leader's legacy--his style, his enduring affect on the world, even his reading habits...or lack thereof. Speaking of which, Laura Bush unveiled the design for her husband's book joint this week, and the ultra-traditional structure that nods to Washington but bows to the rest of Southern Methodist University's campus isn't winning any points with architecture critics. But how does W's design stack up against his predecessors? We checked out the libraries of fellow recent commanders-in-chief completed in the last three decades to compare.
43's George W. Bush Presidential Center was designed by New York-based architect Robert A.M. Stern to match the rest of Smu's Neo-Georgian campus. The brick and limestone structure is meant to evoke both Washington and Texas through its classical architecture and native landscaping (is that brush we see out front for Bush to clear? »
- Alissa Walker
Drive a Mercedes with Your iPhone and Nine Other Mind-Blowing Stories This Week on Fast Company
20 November 2009 3:45 PM, PST
Mind-blowing phrase of the week: "interferometric modulation," which can be loosely translated as "Oh my God! Qualcomm’s Mirasol e-reader has color video!"
Mercedes Benz unveiled an app that lets you control your car with the iPhone. But Intel one-ups the luxe car maker with an implantable chip that lets you control your computer using only your thoughts.Round two of the juice-packaging cage match started late last year with Pepsi’s Tropicana fiasco, and this week Coke’s Minute Maid unveiled a juicy new look (courtesy of Master of Design cover boy David Butler).
Los Angeles took home the crown of Creative Capital of the World, in a recent report. Though we guess the strong surge in sales over at Diy marketplace Etsy proves that any craft-corner in any basement in America is plenty creative enough.Blogging pioneer Anil Dash is bringing crowd expertise to the sizable task of »
- Kate Rockwood
ComScore's New Study Finds Dope on "Movie Junkies"
20 November 2009 3:30 PM, PST
Research group comScore released its study on "movie junkies" yesterday that surveyed the behavior of 500,000 moviegoers who bought tickets online in September 2009. Some of the highlights:
Fandango rules the market. Over $31 million is spent each month buying online movie tickets, with 81% of those tickets purchased at Fandago.com.
Females 25-54 are heavy online ticket buyers. Women are actually more likely to make decisions about movie night than men: movie ticket purchasers are 39% more likely to be female. Maybe men would rather watch at home? DVD sales were an equal split between the genders.
The DVD market is dying. Literally. DVD purchases are far more likely to be made by older, affluent and highly-educated Caucasians (aka retirees). Most teens and people from ethnic groups said they bought less than one DVD a month.
Caucasians lag when it comes to using technology to find movies. Caucasians were far behind African Americans, Asians »
- Alissa Walker
Can Chegg Beat the Kindle at the Textbook Game?
20 November 2009 3:00 PM, PST
The Kindle may be the king of e-readers, but it has a long way to go before being accepted as an acceptable replacement for textbooks. When Amazon's device was introduced at Princeton for classroom assignments recently, it received mostly negative reviews. Now the Kindle's budding classroom legacy is being challenged by Chegg, an online textbook rental service that just raised a whopping $112 million in a round led by Insight Venture Partners.
Chegg deals in good old-fashioned print books, but saves paper by letting students rent textbooks in a Netflix-like model. The company, founded in 2007, already serves hundreds of thousands of students at 6,400 colleges, and the new cash infusion will allow it to grow even more. Unsurprisingly, it will probably be able to keep the Kindle at bay.
While school administrators have argued that the Kindle can cut textbook costs in half, Chegg's service takes 60% to 75% off a book's retail price. »
- Ariel Schwartz
Workers Under Threat: Blamefest Stunts Innovation [Ed. Note: Who Wrote This Headline?]
20 November 2009 2:30 PM, PST
If the chart above is giving you flashbacks to your last roundtable, chances are you've been blamed for something before. Was it your fault? Doesn't matter. Others in the room are likely to start feeling angry and defensive. Arguing is likely to break out. Then finger-pointing. Then middle finger-pointing. Did he just call you a "skank" below his day-old coffee breath?! Oh, no he didn't!
Where were we?
Ah, yes. Arguing amongst each other stunts innovation, according to a new study by the USC Marshall School of Business and Stanford University. The study, "Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions," points out that blamefests make everyone who overhears them fearful to take risks and less likely to learn from their mistakes. Rather then laying out your plan to revolutionize an industry, you just want to prove you aren't as big a liability as the guy the next cube over. »
- Ben Paynter
Study Says Compressed Air Cars Are a Pipe Dream--Focus on EVs
20 November 2009 2:00 PM, PST
Compressed air cars are the ultimate romantic vision of our transportation future. A car powered by air? What could be better than that? A lot of things, it turns out. According to "Economic and Environmental Evaluation of Compressed Air Cars," a paper published in Environmental Research Letters (Erl), compressed air cars scored worse than electric vehicles on energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and life-cycle costs. The cars are, in other words, just plain inefficient.
All is not lost for air car devotees, however. While the Erl paper shows that compressed air hold less than 1% of the energy of gasoline, and that cars powered by the stuff could only travel 29 miles before a recharge, hybrid compressed air cars are viable--and could even compete with hybrid electric vehicles.
That's good news for researchers banking on hybrid technology, but disappointing for the slew of companies (Tata, Mdi, K'Airmobiles) hoping to make big bucks on compressed air cars. »
- Ariel Schwartz
Ad With Dying, Computer-Animated Polar Bears Stirs Controversy
20 November 2009 1:30 PM, PST
What does shock marketing do for a problem as big as global warming?
How far is too far, in the effort to teach the public about global warming?
A U.K. group called Plane Stupid is drawing fire for a new ad they're airing, which depictes polar bears chucked from planes and falling to their death. It's meant to illustrate the point that every plane flight emits about 880 pounds of carbon-dioxide--about the weight of a polar bear.
As Ed Gillespie, the co-director of sustainable marketing firm Futerra writes in The Guardian:
This is the new promotional film from anti-aviation expansion campaigners Plane Stupid. It's the latest in a series of climate change "shock ads" ranging from Greenpeace's now slightly dated Friday the 13th in which a hijacked plane is flown into Sizewell nuclear power station while a family playing on the beach stands agog, to the government's own recent Bedtime Stories »
- Cliff Kuang
Infographic of the Day: The Brains vs. Beauty Quandry
20 November 2009 12:30 PM, PST
Everyone understands the various categories displayed in this Venn diagram.
In hunting for a partner or a fling, we all known the trade-offs between beauty and brains. But we've never before seen a chart that so accurately describes the trials and tribulations of meeting someone worth dating.
Not a whole lot to say about this one--just check it out. (We recognize that even creating a chart to map these sorts of things--and listing attractiveness on an axis--presupposes a very male way of looking at things.)
But there are some interesting scientific data points in the brains vs. beauty quandary. Men really do prefer women with curves. In turn, curvy women are both more fertile, and tend to be smarter (and produce smarter kids). So among women, sexual selection does seem to be giving men what they want.
Women, meanwhile, tend to be attracted to more masculine men when fertile, and more feminine men when not. »
- Cliff Kuang
Can Protein Sciences Produce a Swine Flu Vaccine in Time? Update: Likely No
20 November 2009 12:00 PM, PST
Update: A Fda advisory panel has ruled that Protein Sciences' insect cell-based flu vaccine requires more safety tests before being made commercially available in the U.S. The panel said the vaccine appeared to be as safe and effective as more traditional egg-based flu vaccines, but there were concerns over a few patients who had adverse responses, according to Bloomberg. The Fda isn't required to take the panel's advice, but, considering how concerned the public is over vaccine safety already, it seems unlikely that the agency would go against the ruling. As detailed in the earlier post below, Protein Sciences received $35 million from the U.S. to develop a H1N1 vaccine last June, but the company spent the better part of last summer fighting involuntary bankruptcy.
As the start of a new school year begins, concerns over H1N1--aka swine flu--are growing. Everyone's waiting to hear when a vaccine will be available, »
- Erica Westly
SocialCycling Turns Unrecyclable Products Into Usable Items
20 November 2009 11:30 AM, PST
We write a lot about upcycling, or the practice of reusing products for new purposes to prevent waste. Now Dmd Green, an environmental management consulting company, wants to make the process even easier with its new SocialCycling program, which takes items that are nearly impossible (or impossible) to recycle and finds new uses for them.
The program, announced earlier this month, gathers reclaimed materials and post-consumer products from Dmd Green clients at a central SocialCycling site. Once at the site, products are separated and delivered to artisans, manufacturers, and anyone else who might have use for them. Pvc scrap, for example, is being given to workrooms in Africa to be turned into lining for backpacks. So SocialCycling simultaneously solves a disposal problem for a company and provides a service to African consumers.
In order to make sure its products don't end up in a landfill in China, SocialCycling monitors upcycled »
- Ariel Schwartz
Intel's Mind-Reading Chips: Replace Your Mouse With Your Brain
20 November 2009 11:00 AM, PST
You know those neat mind-control toys? Well, Intel has some grand plans for mind control that go far beyond their limited power. By 2020, the company's researchers plan to have chips that let you control computers with your thoughts.
But here's the scary part: To read your brain waves, Intel's not planning on having you wear some kind of skull-cap--the solution venerable sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke proposed--no, instead you'll have tiny chips actually implanted directly into your brain. Brings a whole new meaning to "Intel Inside" doesn't it?
The technology works by recognizing the patterns your brain makes while you're thinking about a particular thing. Much as the Ibm team that's working on simulated brain technology has been doing, Intel's team has been using functional resonance imaging scans to investigate what patterns real human brains make under specific stimuli. Under similar stimuli, different people's brain patterns tend to look the »
- Kit Eaton
Inside the Vamp-artment of Twilight's Edward Cullen, Buy It for $3.3M!
20 November 2009 10:30 AM, PST
Must every facet of Twilight's sparkly-skinned lead vampire Edward be irresistible? He may be a blood chugger, but his interior design sense doesn't suck. The character's (played by Robert Pattinson) digs are featured prominently in New Moon, and the pics below will surely help bring to life many a teen fantasy.
It's designed by Arthur Erickson, the award-winning architect behind Fresno, California's City Hall, the San Diego Convention Center, the Kuwait Oil Complex, and the Ritz-Carlton in Vancouver.
It has more than 5,000 square feet, has five bedrooms, four bathrooms, an outdoor pool, a chef's kitchen, and a koi pond. A steady stream of porcelain-fleshed goth girl visitors is not officially included in $3.298 million pricetag, but, you know...
Broker Jason Soprovich is the one to bribe for an appointment.
[Via Apartment Therapy]
Images via soprovich.com
»
- Tyler Gray
Nendo Brings Minimalist Magic to New Issey Miyake Shop
20 November 2009 10:00 AM, PST
The shops furniture evokes shopping carts, in a beautifully funky way.
Last week, we brought you a slideshow highlighting a new exhibit of works by Oki Sato, the founder of Nendo. Today, Nendo has announced their latest project: A hyper-sexy series of display furniture, which is being deployed at Issey Miyake shops across Tokyo.
The new Issey Miyake line has new items in 20 colors each, and will refresh every two months. So Nendo designed a series of display pieces which can constantly be arranged in new, quirky, overlapping patterns--an idea of constant change lifted from the chaotic, always evolving state of Japanese convenience stores. The make the parallel more explicit, the furniture itself is made to look like a wire-frame shopping cart, and the packaging designs (seen on the shelves above) look like food containers.
»
- Cliff Kuang
Looking for New Homes? Google's Got an App for That Too
20 November 2009 9:00 AM, PST
Remember that news about Google kind of getting into the mortgage game? New news means it looks like the search giant is serious about getting into helping you buy homes--Google's quietly pulling together a real estate database.
As part of ongoing tweaks to its real estate listings, Google's rolled out individual pages, or summary sheets, for all those properties listed in Google Maps. The information includes location info, photographs, video Street View scenes containing the property, local transport info, and adWords adverts. Basically it's all the info you'd need to help you make a choice on looking at a property in person when you're on the market to buy a new home. To help sort it all out you can email yourself the relevant data. And if you don't like the particular property you've found, but you like the area, then there's a "search nearby" capability.
The other neat trick »
- Kit Eaton
Design Nirvana: Lego Teams Up With Muji
20 November 2009 8:30 AM, PST
Lego has launched thousands of young designers into a lifetime of tinkering; Muji is a paragon of clean, ingenious design. So naturally, the two have paired up for toy sets that blend elements from each powerhouse.
The kit comes with Lego bricks, some paper, and a special hole punch that's exactly the size of a Lego peg. You start by punching out patterns in the paper:
And then you can use that paper, and some bricks, to create almost anything you want:
This isn't the first time that Lego has turned to design to refresh its brand--they've had great success with their Lego Architecture series, which features models of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and the Som's John Hancock Center. (Designers, meanwhile have played with childhood toys--the best example being Form Us With Love's furniture made of blown-up erector sets.)
For now, the set's only available in Japan. And the »
- Cliff Kuang
Get Your Hands Dirty
20 November 2009 8:00 AM, PST
Twenty-five years ago, I decided to quit my day job as a partner and creative director for a small advertising agency, which I had started four years prior, to get back into design, from whence I came. My reason at the time was to get my hands dirty again. I was sick of the management responsibilities and politics that came from the ad game, not to mention the creative compromising that was part of everyday life at our little shop. But the biggest reason was that I wasn't really "making" anything--i don't mean money, I mean "stuff."
Back then, "getting your hands dirty" meant exactly that. Before the computer, we quite literally made our designs with messy stuff like markers, paint, and even the occasional really messy pastels. When I look at the finished work from those early days at Duffy Design, what I remember fondly is the cutting, the pasting, »
- Joe Duffy
Watch Out Apple, Amazon: Qualcomm's E-Reader Will Play Color Video
20 November 2009 7:30 AM, PST
E-readers may or may not emerge as the must-have gadget of 2010, but nearly all the devices out now have a problem--their screens only do gray scale, and move too slowly for video. But Qualcomm's got an answer for that.
Mirasol, a Qualcomm subsidiary, has got an e-reader on the way that's likely to be the breakout e-reader that beats all other e-readers--yes, even the successful Kindle. The technology exists as a demonstrator mock-up for now, but the device's screen, busily under development, is the real key: It's sunlight-readable, meaning it outclasses LCDs for outdoors e-book browsing; it's color-capable (color's the reason the Barnes and Noble rumors got us excited); and its pixel-refresh rate zooms past standard e-ink tech so that it can actually render video.
The trick is how the new e-paper works--it uses "interferometric modulation" instead of the electrophoretic system other e-ink makers use. Here's how it works: A »
- Kit Eaton
Ask the Headhunter Q&A: Should I Take a Cut in Pay?
20 November 2009 7:00 AM, PST
Q: I've been unemployed for six weeks. Was earning around $120k. Have been offered a position at $85k and, quite frankly, I need the money. Even more important, I recognize that my self esteem is too bound up in my career: I need to work for more than just the money. Am seriously considering accepting this lower offer, because I believe these folks cannot afford to pay more. Will my chances of negotiating another position at a higher salary be irrevocably damaged? Advice, please, and thanks in advance.
A: You're facing a difficult decision, and you need to be sure you are keeping the key issues separate. How long can you afford to go without a job? How much time will you be able to devote to continuing your search while doing the job you're considering taking? How will being unemployed versus "under-employed" affect your self-esteem?
I could easily tell »
- Nick Corcodilos
The Eco-Conscious Thanksgiving Menu: Now Serving Greens!
20 November 2009 6:30 AM, PST
The hidden cost of overeating on Thanksgiving isn't just an expanding waistline; it's a fatter carbon footprint, too.
Studies show that most groceries travel about 1,500 miles from the farm to store shelves. The same distance covered by your average car (one that gets about 30 miles per gallon) pumps out about 1,200 pounds of CO2, according to this math. Most commodities arrive in bulk on the back of a flatbed, so the impact is likely even greater.
To help you green up your Thanksgiving table, Government Information and Data Services Librarian Linda Zellmer has visually plotted the Usda's 2007 Census of Agriculture information to show where today's pilgrim staples actually come from. Some results are surprising--and might help you figure out where to overindulge a bit more eco-consciously.
For Chicagoans, having that second piece of pumpkin pie should be a no-brainer.
If you live in Dallas, though, it might make sense to skip »
- Ben Paynter
Ibm Technology Offers Real-Time Analysis of Forest Fires
20 November 2009 6:00 AM, PST
Climate change has increased the unpredictability of weather patterns, and as residents of the Western U.S. know, that means a jump in the number of forest fires. In the past year alone, 76,000 individual fires have consumed 5.8 million acres, according to the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center. We might not be able to stop fires from starting, but researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Umbc), think they can at least provide us with better information once fires have been ignited.
At the moment, smoke pattern analysis is limited to front-line reports, low-resolution satellite images, and weather data that gets updated every six hours. But by using Ibm InfoSphere Streams (technology that analyzes information from a stream of sources), researchers hope to cull data from already-existing surface, aerial, and satellite sensors to identify the progression of wildfires, to model fire and smoke behavior forecasts, and to issue real-time forecasts for firefighters. »
- Ariel Schwartz
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