reference - Yule Heibel on Diigo

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New breed of 'net newsers' shape US media habits, says Pew report | Media | guardian.co.uk

Jemima Kiss writes about the recent Pew report that describes how "well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research."

Interesting findings on education levels and TV-watching *and* interest (lack thereof) in science and technology, too.

Tags: newspapers, television, media, news, the_guardian, jemima_kiss, reference, aggregators, pew, trends on 2008-08-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.guardian.co.uk

A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research.
"net newsers" - web users under 35 who read more political blogs than watch national news coverage, rely heavily on web-based news during the day and have a strong interest in technology and technology news.
Net newsers are typically affluent and 80% are graduates, making them a highly desirable demographic for advertisers.
They do favour some traditional media brands, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic and the BBC, the Pew survey of 3,600 adults found. But only 47% watch TV news on an average day.
The research paints a picture of steady decline in the US newspaper industry, with the percentage of Americans who regularly read print titles falling from 58% in 1993 to 34% in 2008.
According to the long-running survey, respondents saying they listened to radio news fell from 47% to 35% over the same period. As for network TV, the national news dropped from 60% to 29% and local news from 77% to 52%.
However, TV is still the most popular medium for the US, with 46% of the public classified as "traditionalists" who watch throughout the day, but are likely to be older and less well educated than net newsers.
More than 40% of this traditionalist group are unemployed, and were found to prefer visual news stories to audio and have little interest in science or technology news.
A further 14% are described as "disengaged", a poorly-educated group with little interest in current affairs.
The research also found that the proportion of young people in the US getting no daily news has increased from 25% in 1998 to 34%, with only 10% of people using social networking sites for their news.

PDF: The Entrepreneurial Advantage of World Cities

31-page PDF (still to read), "The Entrepreneurial Advantage of World Cities," subtitled "Evidence from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Data."

From the abstract:
QUOTE
Recent discussions in the Economic Geography literature increasingly focus on creative cities and the importance of creativity for achieving economic growth. Considering the increased attention on urban areas it is not surprising that the regional dimension of entrepreneurship is a subject of great interest. We set out a framework encompassing the individual process between entrepreneurial perceptions and entrepreneurial activity and demonstrate how the urban environment can have an impact on this process.
UNQUOTE

Tags: cities, data, entrepreneurship, reference on 2008-08-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Digital Urban: Welcome to MapTube from CASA: A Place to Put Maps

"The main principle of MapTube is that shared maps can be overlayed to compare data visually. For example, to see a map of the London Underground overlayed on top of a map of population you simply go to the search page and enter the keywords "tube" and "population". Then click on the two relevant maps to add them."

This has potential for some really fine-grained mapping, specific to local place.

Tags: maptube, mapping_apps, maps, mash_ups, reference on 2008-05-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromdigitalurban.blogspot.com

"Waste not; Making the most of our sewage" 2007-waste-not.pdf (application/pdf Object)

one-page PDF, "Waste not; Making the most of our sewage"

Tags: sewage_treatment, sewage_uses, victoria, reference, pdf on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.canada.com

White paper - distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media « Technobabble 2.0

"...white paper outlining the thoughts and views of several key stakeholders who met late last year to discuss the issue of measuring online influence."

Tags: technobabble, socialmedia, reference on 2008-04-28 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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" Half of Canadians Watch TV on PC" Mediacaster Magazine - 4/25/2008

- article on the results of a Rogers Communications sponsored survey, with last year/this year data, on Canadian online habits: how satisfied we are, what we're using the internet for, etc. Nothing much about local news, but the Ipsos-Reid survey people probably didn't ask that question (Q: "How much time do you spend online finding things out about your local community?" A: "Uh, probably about 80 hours...?" <jk>) (Or how about this question: "How much time do you spend 'conversing' with others about local issues?"...)

Tags: mediacastermagazine, canada, online_media, surveys, reference on 2008-04-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.mediacastermagazine.com

Canadians are moving from simple email exchanges or instant messaging programs to richer Web applications like online video.
Survey results commissioned by Rogers Cable Communications Inc. show that Canadians are embracing the power of the Internet, spending more time using the Internet for day-to-day tasks like paying bills and entertainment.
"Canadians are well-known as early adopters of new technologies and have taken to the Internet in record numbers
"Activities like paying bills and sharing photos are things we used to do off-line, however these two activities saw the greatest growth in terms of online participation over the past year, showing that Canadians are using the Internet to their benefit."
The Internet has become the easiest way to communicate with a network of friends, family and acquaintances and the way that Canadians communicate online has also begun to change.
Add Sticky Note
- - how has it begun to change, exactly?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-26
Activity % of Canadians

Watching live TV on a computer 50

Making video phone calls from a computer 49

Making and sharing videos with friends and family 46

Downloading and reading books online 39

High quality videoconferencing by webcam 34
The average Canadian spends up to 17 hours per week online.
Communicating with friends and family (i.e. Facebook, MySpace)

85 89
Add Sticky Note
- - "conversation" clearly leads the way....
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-26

Visualization Methods

Tags: reference, chart, visualization, methods, visualisation on 2008-04-24 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.cems.uwe.ac.uk

» Six map apps that put Portland on the mapping map - Silicon Florist

- description of six unusual mapping applications ("Portland is map happy"), several by Matt King ("Map King"?):
1. Platial
2. Unthirsty
3. KnitMap
4. SocialMap
5. Mapdango
6. WeoGeo

Meanwhile, the comments board is filling up with even more! (Like expressomap.com ...wow!)

Tags: reference, mapping_apps, silicon_florist, platial, unthirsty, knitmap, socialmap, mapdango, weogeo on 2008-04-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromsiliconflorist.com

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Michiel de Lange posted keynotes and slides online from the recent Mobile City conference.

Tags: mobile_city, reference, locative_media, video, cities, architecture on 2008-04-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.themobilecity.nl

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Placemaking « Stephen Rees’s blog

Stephen Rees blogs Jan Gehl's talk at the Gateway Theatre, Richmond February 28, 2008. Found via Gordon Price ("Pricetags"), otherwise I would have missed this excellent summary (and a great comments thread, too). Coincidentally, I also watched Andres Duany's very engaging talk, "On the Edge," from January 16/08 on the SFU "City Program" site (video here: http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_video014.htm). It's a bit disconcerting to think that but for a fluke, I could have missed both these items. I don't remember seeing Gehl's lecture announced, and I didn't see any media follow-ups anywhere else. Duany's lecture I knew about, but missed that a video of same was available. Well, better late than never, I guess...

Tags: jan_gehl, lectures, place_making, reference, stephen_rees, urbanism on 2008-03-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromstephenrees.wordpress.com

When Professor Gehl first graduated, architects were big and arrogant and people were small and insignificant. Modernists thought streets were bad. They designed towers in the grass. Most schools of architecture didn’t talk about people – and many still don’t. They were led astray by Art: it looks good in a magazine but people won’t use it. That was forty years ago, and then after studying it for a long time people started asking him how it should be done, so he started a consulting firm eight years ago: they call themselves “urban quality consultants”.
During the car invasion of the 1950s planners and politicians panicked. They thought that the purpose of life is to have more cars. Cities were designed for cars and parking.
All city planning then was about the capacity of roads and parking. Every city has a department for traffic engineers. Is there a city department for pedestrians and public life? Does anybody know anything about people?
Add Sticky Note
- - right, and I guess Duany's additonal question would be, 'why do we need the traffic OR pedestrian experts in the first place?' Shouldn't planners be well-rounded and generalist enough that they can approach problems from multiple perspectives, vs. ONLY from, say, a traffic engineering p.o.v.?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
“People are an endangered species.”
Add Sticky Note
- - Duany said the same thing, specifically castigating environmentalists who continue to advocate for every species EXCEPT people/humans, and who insist on seeing humanity as the problem. His take was that it's specifically the North-American-originated middle-class way of life that's the problem, not people as such. That particular group he links strongly with suburbs, not with rural or urban life.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
Add Sticky Note
- THAT is hilarious...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
He has found nine cities including Barcelona, Lyons, Strasbourg, Curitiba – and each has the necessary qualities - lively, attractive, safe, sustainable and healthy. And they did this by putting the emphasis on walking and bicycling.
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- I remember Strasbourg from the late 70s and early 80s, when cars still clotted the old town, and then seeing it after cars were banned from many of those narrow old streets. What a difference. When I was 17, I went to Paris by myself, and, sitting in a sidewalk cafe, I clearly thought, "The car has killed this city." That was over 30 years ago, but it seems Paris is FINALLY starting to realize that it needs to get a grip on the problem.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
The shift in emphasis has been from market to meeting. People come downtown to see what is going on. The city is a destination in its own right. We are now an experience oriented society, but due to family fission and smaller homes if you want to see other people, you have to get out of the house. We want the kind of quality we see when we go on holiday in our own city. People leave the underpopulated suburbs to come into city, not seeking out greenery but the company of other people.”Life is too short to go on holidays”.
He told the story of the man who found a skunk in his basement. He tried to encourage it to leave by setting out a trail of breadcrumbs to the woods. Next day he had two skunks in the basement.
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- :-)
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
Q, In Vancouver we currently have the notion that density alone will cause these changes to happen

A. You have to be proactive. It has to be wider concept – “clever density” – do not take out the sun and make it windy – no one can see what is going on on the street 50 floors up. Senseless density won’t help – “high rise is the lazy architect’s solution to density” – you need “sensitivity in density”
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- - hmm, I think I prefer Duany's concept of the transect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
Q – shared space streets -

A – While the plan is to move that way, Gehl likes pedestrian priority better than shared streets. He was against the idea of traffic sign free streets being tried in Holland. He was very critical of that way to doing it – “people should be free of worry”. We need quality in how people feel about it, not just accident statistics.
Add Sticky Note
- - again, transects: that idea wouldn't work in every situation, but in some urban and in some rural areas, as well as small towns, it can work.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06
q – gentritfication?

a – There is no smart answer to that. When you improve the area new people move in. This should not stand in the way of improving cities. You also need a social policy. Bogota used transit as social policy providing good transit not more roads for cars improves the lot of the poor.
At the end of the evening Professor Gehl wanted to present a copy of one of his books to the Mayor of Richmond. There was no Mayor to take the book – nor any councillors. Only a rather junior member of the planning staff. It was explained to me that there had been a day long briefing by Prof Gehl of the staff, but again no politicians attended.
Add Sticky Note
- Ha!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-06

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› Notes from the ‘Global Place’ conference

Still to read through this blog post, which I bookmarked because it includes such a great photo of Liane LeFaivre, friend from way back when at MIT days! Liane has a new book out on playgrounds, also bookmarked today, and has (judging by Kauffman's blog entry) been up to interesting things elsewhere, too. Re. the conference itself, Kauffman writes, "The conference was a resounding call for pragmatic utopianism and an integration of urbanism and ecology. It had an emphasis on getting things done rather than living to an ideal. Yet there was some agreement that there is gap between academic discussion and the cultural and material realities. Enough talk. There is a greater need for implementation." This makes me think that my interest in the local isn't so marginal, perhaps, insofar as *theory* happens ...what's the word?, across time & space? = unlocalized?, while *implementation* is local. So, if you understand the local very well -- and it's really NOT easy -- you get a better sense of how theory can work or be useful. K. adds a very useful observation re. the difference btw. space & place. The latter is made over time.

Tags: conference, ecology, liane_lefaivre, place_making, playgrounds, reference, urbanism on 2008-02-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.joshuakauffman.org

Proposed design solutions rarely spoke of how sustainable architecture practices could be incorporated into a larger idea of empowered development that addresses issues of poverty and self-reliance. Many participants mentioned the necessity of giving urbanizers the freedom to determine and adapt to their own built environments. Yet we glanced over the subject of how communities with differing wealth, expertise and capabilities could autonomously and locally apply sustainable solutions from the bottom up.
there is great variation amongst the situations and drivers that bring people to move entire lives and families from one space to another. But space is not even the same as place. Place is something uniquely made over time. We should wonder how ‘place’ is made when people exodus en masse to locations of proximity to economic opportunity.
Add Sticky Note
- - great point.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-21
The legislative branch has lost much of its political power to the executive, which is usually aligned with global corporate capital.

Privatization removes functions of legislature and shifts them to the private sector

Sassen believes that cities are a critical space for overcoming the hollowing of the legislative body and in their capacity to make informal politics.
Add Sticky Note
- - Beautiful! That clenched hand, ready to thrust forward, encapsulates Liane's innate enthusiasm and energy wonderfully! I can just hear her saying "yes! take the picture now!"
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-21
As a critical regionalist, Liane Lefaivre seeks to understand the context of a place in order to give it meaning.

Le Faivre’s current project uses the concept of play to confront major issues affecting European cities, especially the tension between communities. Citing Schiller, Gross, Freud, Huizinga, and the Dutch painting genre “Children’s Play,” she talked about the importance of play in exploring our world and in crossing over cultural boundaries.

Post World War Two, the Dutch chose to instill civic values and a civic experience through play. Aldo Van Eyk designed multiple play spaces in central neighbourhood locations in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam playgrounds were not conceived individually, but as part of a net. They were polycentric, interstitial and participatory.
Michael Sorkin, whose work deals with the investigation of how politics and architecture are ‘conjoined,’ came with a stunning if somewhat ironic talk about slums as utopian propositions. At the core of the urban crisis are slums, where 1.5 billion people live. And though slums remind us of the most desperate of human conditions, and are very real problems, they are paragons of efficiency and democracy. They can respond to our environmental oversights.

The canary in the minefield has croaked and the solution is to build sustainable cities.

As Jane Jacobs spoke of good cities being self-organizing and morphological, slums, with these and other desirable qualities give us the possibility of thinking of the utopian condition:
- high degrees of internal equality, which can be identified as the basis of solidarity
- low levels of consumption
- high levels of reuse and recycling
- logical adjacencies to economic resources
- high levels of self-organization stemming from tight community grouping
- scales that are morphologically adaptable
Celebrated Indian Architect Charles Correa conveyed the great hope India has placed in its cities. He pointed out how they break down the caste system, provide freedom, generate economic skills and are agents of social engineering. He maintained that we need to increase the carrying capacity of cities, and that we should not be looking for beauty in them, but in the synergy that delivers the quality of what we would call a ‘city.’ While celebrating the absorptive capacity of Indian cities as destinations for rural immigrants who otherwise would have gone to ‘Australia’ he described Bombay as “a great city and a terrible place.”

Correa, in one of the more referenced moments of the conference, differentiated between the scientific ideas of similarity as they relate to building large-scale projects from scratch:

Same-similar is life. Same-identical is death.

Correa then presented his own bill of rights for Indian Housing:
- open to sky space
- malleability
- incrementality
- participation
- income generation
- equity
- disaggregation
- pluralism
Add Sticky Note
- "Same-similar is life. Same-identical is death." = interesting way to put it...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-02-22
With neoliberalism shaping globalization, there’s heightened competition amongst cities to attract industry and tourism. Rather than seeing cities as efficient and perhaps aesthetic places to live, they are being reconceived and marketed from the demand side as sites from conferences, festivals and conventions. Susan Fainstein argued that global cities can bear responses to the transitory whims of global corporations, the competition for foreign capital, and the placelessness of global culture.

Global citiies are strategic sites for economic control - yet they cannot control themselves - control emanates from them, but its not clear how much control cities have over their own boundaries.

While cities are becoming more responsive to global forces, Fainstein thinks we should encourage democracy on the local level to allow for equitable relationships. Inspired by David Harvey’s “Social Justice and the City,” and praising Amsterdam as a city with high social equality without sacrificing prosperity, she listed three factors that allow cities to deliver justice:
1. the extent to which government is entrepreneurial
2. the amount and quality of planning
3. the amount of focus given to those most in need
Fainstein praised Sen and Nussbaum for their ‘capabilities approach’ to development which seeks to ensure substantial freedoms to people, and sees poverty as capability-deprivation. One such poverty is environment degradation, which often is caused from distant global forces and reinforces environmental injustice. Global climate change has the potential to disproportionately impact poor communities who may not be able to react to problems they didn’t create. Local populations need to be able to respond to global challenges in a way that ensures social justice.
Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future discussed the role of mobile devices in the future of the city. With mobiles, people can record, document, and annotate social space. Ideas, insights and emotions can be transmitted. Townsend calls this functional telepathy “telepathic urbanism.”

Telepathic Urbanism would help us experiment with new social ways of urban living that are based on real-time information and feedback. Thus we could get more out of the existing structures of cities and optimize our lives in them through a better representation of their energy, resource and material realities.
And finally, Robert Jan van Pelt, expert witness in the trial against holocaust denier David Irving, explains in this video (sorry embed not working) how an architectural analysis of Auschwitz proved that the holocaust was not an accident.

we can follow all these decisions and see that their is no practice of killing, then their is a practice of murdering, then there is a policy of murdering…architecture of the camps morphed into the question of answering holocaust morphology…was it intended yes or no?

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You

Fascinating diagram/ map by Wired of a blog post from inception ("thought") to ...you (or them). "You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers."

Tags: blogging, lifecycles, maps, reference, virtual_ecosystems, virtual_traces on 2008-02-14 and saved by29 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Factors in Canadians’ Cultural Activities - Research for the arts - Hill Strategies Research | Recherche Inc.

"Are the arts elitist? This report shows that cultural experiences are more important than demographic factors in four cultural activities:

* Reading a book;
* Attending live performances;
* Visiting art galleries; and
* Movie theatre attendance."

Includes links to PDFs of relevant research and findings.

Tags: art_reception, arts_development, canada, reference, research on 2008-02-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.hillstrategies.com

Innovations for the Built Environment 2008 - Designing energy efficient tall buildings

- one of many pages on "Innovations for the Built Environment" conference coming up in London, Feb. 26-28/08. This page is from the "seminars" section, which lists many sessions over those 2 days. Other sections include links to the "exhibit," "attractions," "the arena," "conference," and more.

Tags: built_environment, conference, ecology, energy, london, reference, skyscrapers, tall_buildings, urbanism on 2008-02-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Cool Hunting: Three New Stadiums

Description/ links to 3 new stadiums, introduced thus: "In the era of starchitecture, few projects pose more of a challenge to renowned architects than the scale and complexity of a city's crown jewel, the stadium." The 3 projects are Camp Nou (Spain), Beijing National Stadium (China), and Wembley Stadium (UK). Camp Nou's exterior in particular sounds fascinating -- it could be a terrific public art work or an annoying visual nuisance, depending on articulation...

Tags: architecture, reference, stadiums, starchitecture on 2008-01-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Lettering Grows in Brooklyn: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

- fascinating project about documenting various typefaces in Brooklyn

Tags: brooklyn, design, lettering, place_making, reference, typeface on 2008-01-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.aiga.org

Looking for lettering in New York’s outer boroughs is not as easy as it is in Manhattan, due to varying patterns of growth, decay and, in some cases, rebirth. The outer boroughs are more residential and less commercial than Manhattan, yet they also retain more of the city’s dwindling industrial areas. To a lesser extent they have avoided—cross my fingers—the trend toward “luxo-condo-ization.” But if any borough promises to be as rich as Manhattan in lettering it would be Brooklyn, which was actually a thriving metropolis prior to the 1898 consolidation that led to present-day greater New York while the other boroughs were largely rural.
In Brooklyn, commercial and industrial neighborhoods are the best places to find lettering since the buildings there have names, mottoes and other inscribed lettering as well as more obvious signage. In residential areas, walk-ups and tenement buildings from the end of the 19th century and Art Deco era offer prime examples, while the abundant brownstones and row houses—not to mention housing projects of the 1950s and ’60s—are not as conducive.

my dad's architecture photos - a photoset on Flickr

A fascinating collection of grim-looking buildings, captured mostly in black & white, exemplifying the brutalist style of architecture. They were taken in the late 60s, early 70s, by someone studying to be an architect. Just the other day I re-read somewhere that loss breeds resentment, and one wonders how seethingly full of resentment society must have been to allow these structures, which show nothing but contempt for the people who inhabit or visit or circulate around them, to be built. Were they a misdirected expression of loss? You really have to wonder...

Tags: architecture, brutalism, built_environment, flickr, photo_gallery, reference on 2008-01-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass -- New York Magazine

References to a "creative underclass" and "roiling Schadenfreude" of course set off bells for anyone familiar with the Victoria BC scene, which has long sustained itself on highly creative (often volatile) people living on substandard wages. True, that might be the only thing Victoria and NYC have in common, but the socially determined psychology suggested by the author's intro makes me want to read this with an eye on our local scene. We have in this city "a huge cheering section for failure," as a local commentator once put it, and maybe Grigoriadis's article will shed light on how that happens.

Tags: creatives, psychology, reference, schadenfreude, vanessa_grigoriadis, victoria on 2008-01-25 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Seattle.gov - Seattle Right-of-Way Improvement Manual - Latest Online Manual

Useful reference from City of Seattle re. street / urbanscape improvements, broken down in detailed format according to features (from "awnings" to "underground utilities").

Tags: planning, reference, seattle, street_scape, urban_design on 2008-01-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.seattle.gov

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