City scholar Joel Kotkin argues against the idea of an urban revitalization panacea in an interview for Metropolis Mag. He is critical of Richard Florida's book The Rise of the Creative Class A piece of Florida's theory is correct. There is a niche for these kinds of boutique cities, but the idea t...
[Place and Space] What I learnt with Skateboarding
I used to do skateboard. Now after having read Ian Borden's book Skateboarding, Space and the City, I fully understand what he means. Here are the "social lessons" of skateboarding: - skate sport functions as "focal point" in Schelling's terminology. That means that if you want to look for somebody...
[TheWorld] Where is the 1966 Haight-Ashbury of 2010?
Nice topic tackled by orange cone: Where are the cool places today? For Bohemians there have been many cities that serve as the icons of their age, where "interesting stuff" was happening: Picasso's Paris, Weimar Berlin, Beatnick San Francisco, Swinging London, Post-Wall Berlin, dotcom San Francisc...
THOMAS GRÜNFELD's work is interesting, trying to mix different parts of different animals (ironic critique of "Gemütlichkeit"): ...
[TheWorld] Bill Gates Wealth Index
Brad Templeton introduced in 2001 a nice index: the Bill Gates Wealth Index. The idea is to imagine Gates seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground: How large a denomination would the bill have to make it worth his time to stop and pick up ?Templeton calculated that during 1986, a $5 ...
[MyResearch] Cartomap Webservice Test
I am currently testing cartoserver, which is a webservice that provide webmapping services for campus buildings. You can also read the specifications Here is an example : The corresponding WMS query is http://cartoserver.epfl.ch/cgi-bin/cartoweb-wms-epfl?VERSION=1.1.0 &REQUEST=GetMap&LAYERS=fake_...
[Prospective] Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.
Via scout report Those clever folks in the porn industry have come up with a new trick to boost their placement in Google: they've created fake weblogs which in turn create links to non-fake porn sites, thus boosting the non-fake ...
[MyResearch] bibtex file of my publications
Here are my bibtex entries @techreport{nova1, author="N.Nova", title="Socio-cognitive functions of space in collaborative settings : a literature review about Space, Cognition and Collaboration", series = "CRAFT Internal Report 1", url ="http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/CRAFT_report1.pdf", yea...
[Weird] Cool Design
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[Misc] Peter Drucker's stance
Peter Drucker: General libraries (public libraries) do not contain information. They contain data. The customer decides what is information. Specifically, the general library contains no more information than does the telephone book unless the customer knows what he or she needs and wants. The gen...