Future of Museums

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?

Passive surveillance...an outgrowth of proliferation of web-enabled devices and the resulting IoT. What our devices emit can tell more than we might want to share.

MOOCs as entertainment.

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.

I would like to go!!!

Me too! I have never liked bars, but this might convince me to try a few.

House of the future

Longing for a natural connection, consumers turn to landscape-like decals

Government bring the future to its citizens and the world.  What do you think?

A trend towards less information rather than more?

A fascinating conversation from Nina Simon's blog this week about the intersection of generational demographics and socio-econimonic diversity. Food for thought. . .

Are you a Segmentor or an Integrator? They may be carving out too big a universe of questions to explore, but it's interesting that Google is looking to produce the equivalent of the Framingham Heart Study on work-life issues.