All I can say is, Wow!  This is the sort of thing that could have wide-ranging ramifications, and i suspect that museums will, one day, have to decide which legal direction they will head.  Could buying a membership at a museum exempt the member from legal protections?

Three maps depicting the "walkingsheds" of cafes in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Brooklyn. An interesting look at the possible areas of influence of specific Third Spaces.

This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.

PlaNYC 2030 - a cool future plan for NYC. Of note for my interest is the chapter on Parks and Public Space, but others may find other chapters of interest, especially in terms of how they envision the city 15 years into the future.

Uplifting news...

More good stuff from Geerat j. Vermeij, Distiguished Professor at UC Davis, also a blind geologist. Listening to a Tidepool is a great take on perception and worth the read if you're thinking to incorporate sensory experiences for the seeing and non-seeing visitor.

Folks at any museum who are thinking about incorporating experiences for the blind should watch these videos - especially Describing Colors to Blind People, Intangible Concepts to a Blind Person, and How a Blind Person Uses a Computer. Lots of other good stuff here too, plus you gotta love Tommy's attitude.

One of the more compelling ideas on education I've come across in a while.

Five guests from a variety of sectors will answer questions on how technology and innovation can be used for social good.

Privacy International's 16-minute mini-documentary from DEFCON about privacy is a great, compact answer to the question, "Why does privacy matter?"