Ghanaians have lots to celebrate. The football team defeated Brazil in a dramatic final of the under-20 World Cup, that featured a 0-0 tie through overtime and a 4-3 win on penalties, and fans danced in the streets. (Ghana played a man down through much of the match, and goalkeeper... [view entry]

US politicians talk a lot about Main Street. But what does Main Street actually look like in contemporary America? That’s what Harvard PhD students Jesse Shapins and James Burns, and journalist Kara Oehler, along with public radio producer Ann Heppermann, are doing with their “collaborative documentary”, “Mapping Main Street“. Shapins,... [view entry]

El Oso Archive Summary of Cloud Intelligence Symposium Extremely thorough overview of the Ars Electronica Cloud Intelligence symposium by David Sasaki (tags: cloud intelligence arselectronica ideas networks globalization activism web2.0) [view entry]

Inscentinel ltd Company doing detection of chemical odors (explosives) using honeybees loaded into plastic cartridges. Would be interesting to compare to Herorats, the Tanzanian project to train rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis. (tags: animal innovation invention odor terror explosives biology engineering) FIJI Water Responds to Mother Jones Article |... [view entry]

Driving home from Boston Friday night, I caught much of an interview on Tom Ashbrook’s public radio program, On Point. The interview was with Robert Diggs – the RZA – the founder and leader of Wu Tang Clan, one of the most influential groups in hiphop. RZA was pitching his... [view entry]

My presentation at Applied Brilliance today was a quick version of my Innovation from Constraint talk, a talk that makes the argument that some of the best design ideas come from facing the constraints provided by material circumstance. Using a whole mess of examples stolen from Afrigadget, the talk argues... [view entry]

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s... [view entry]

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s... [view entry]

I’m at the Applied Brilliance conference this morning, a gathering of architects and designers in Bolton Landing, NY, a gorgeous corner of Adirondack State Park. I wasn’t actually scheduled to speak here – my friend Omar Wasow had to pull out of the event so he could be on Oprah’s... [view entry]

I had the realization the other day that the main way in which I procrastinate from the work I should be doing is by taking on other work that’s interesting, but not always necessary. So while I should be finishing a book proposal and authoring a couple of articles before... [view entry]