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What the world eats

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats - “making things visible”.  Listen to an NPR interview and article with the authors of the 2005 book.

The 6th Annual Year in Ideas

The New York Times Magazine highlights the top ideas of 2006:
This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good […]

BlackBerry Orphans

From the Weekend section in the Wall Street Journal:
As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules […]

the Death of the nap

Perfect for a Friday afternoon read. The Toronto Star looks at how culture and the “modern world” impacts the time-honored practice of napping:
To be an enthusiastic napper in 21st-century North America is to be out of step with your time and place. In most of the industrialized world, a nap is seen as a […]

Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge

An old, but fascinating read from the New Yorker:
In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple […]

Advertising Everywhere

Yes, that is advertising covering an escalator handrail. Pingmag looks at 10 tricks of advertisers in the Tokyo subway system.

The social perception of text messaging

New research highlights youth attitudes towards text messaging:
College and high-school students find telephone calls unfulfilling and e-mail messages a bit cold. But they view text messaging and instant messaging as comfortable, authentic forms of communication, according to a pair of researchers at San Jose State University.
From the San Francisco Chronicle via the Chronicle of Higher […]

“Living online”

From New Scientist Tech:
The challenge for this generation is to think of sociality as more than the cyber-intimacy of sharing gossip and photographs and profiles. This is a paradoxical time. We have more information but take less time to think it through in its complexity. We’re connecting globally but talking parochially.

Documenting Old Tokyo

This site features an incredible collection of turn-of-the-century photographs from Japan’s capital city: http://www.oldtokyo.com/

BBC Documentary Archive: The Communications Revolution

Since downloading the new iTunes 7 update, I’ve started browsing through the podcast directory. I stumbled across the BBC’s documentary (4-part podcast) from August, titled “The Communications Revolution:”
Part 1: Communications: Transformation of business and leisure, and the structure of family and society? (mp3)
Part 2: […]

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