CHI'S

Hyper-effeciency: The Train That Never Stops

Via Treehugger

9400 Bike Parking Tower in Tokyo

Via Laughing Squid

Philips' Touch-Sensitive Tattoos

From Philips Design Probes

''Tattoos and physical mutilation are amongst the oldest forms of personal expression and identity. Subcultures have used tattoos as a form of self representation; a visual language communicating personality and status. Philips Design examined the growing trend of extreme body adornment like tattoos, piercing, implants and scarring.

The Electronics Tattoo film expresses the visual power of sensitive technology applied to the human body. The film subtly leads the viewer through the simultaneous emotional and aesthetic transformations between two lovers.''

Check out the film here.

Nike Flywire

Wowlab: Virtual Rain

From Wowlab via Make

iPhone Virtual Piano

Adam's Apple

From The Museum Of Modern Fiction via Neatorama

Singapore-based Josef Lee's take on the biblical story of Adam and Eve together with Steve Jobs and the Macbook computer.

For a ''mature'' audience...
Click here to see the full cartoon

TED Talks - Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration

Cooperation is wealth? (Shot Feb 2005)

Bluetooth Enabled Burka

From the University of Arts in Berlin via Boing Boing

The CharmingBurka sends a self-defined picture of the wearing person to every mobile phone next to it.
More info here.

Flexbooks: Opensource Textbook Creation

From CK-12 via O'reilly

I think this is an amazing idea...

CK12, a non-profit organization launched in 2006, aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide. Using an open-source, collaborative, and web-based compilation model that can be manifested as an adaptive textbook - termed the "FlexBook", CK12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational web texts. The content generated by CK12 will serve as both source material for a student's learning and also, provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge.
...

More info here and here

Anti-Social Website Behaviour

Via The Joy of Tech

Flash Memory Card Holder

Via Core77

From the Coroflot portfolio of : Tom Kenworthy

(Nottingham, UK)

Featured project : Flash Memory Card Holder

Tom Kenworthy's Flash Memory Card Holder concept makes a valiant effort to exhume forgotten cards from bottomless junk drawers and dusty pen holders, uniting memory devices, old and new, as one.

Discover interviews Danah Boyd

Dana Boyd is a PhD Candidate at the School of Information at Berkeley and a Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She has a blog called apophenia.

Click here to see her interview with Discover about how social networks democratize influence and the role of The Internet and new technology in our society.

The Bottom Is Not Enough

From Kevin Kelly's Blog - The Technium

I wrote a book, Out of Control, heralding the immense power of bottom up systems. You know: smart mobs, hive mind, web power, amateur hour, decentralized webs, network effects, and collaborative work. Twenty years ago Out of Control made a wide-ranging and exhaustive case for the remarkable things which decentralized, out-of-control systems can accomplish in biology, technology, and cultural realms. Two decades later I'm still keen on the untapped potential of emergent bottom-up systems.

But throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view.  And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it's worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.

...

Article continued here

The Paperless Home

From the NYT via Treehugger

Pushing paper out of the door
By Hannah Fairfield for the NYT
Published 10 February 2008
Image from the NYT website

Excerpts:

...
“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”
...
A paperless world isn’t automatically a boon for the environment, though. While these digital toys reduce dependence on one resource, they increase it on another: energy. Some devices are always plugged in, eating electricity even when not in use, and gobbling huge amounts of power when they are. Others, like digital cameras and laptop computers, use electricity while they are recharging.

Full Article here

Pong On Your Calculator

Via Make

Play Pong On Calculators! - Watch more amazing videos here

The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos

From Neotarama via Coudal

Mydeco: 3D Online Furniture buying

From Mydeco via Springwise

''A new home decor website from the UK lets shoppers experiment with room planning and buy directly from a wide range of retailers. mydeco, founded by lastminute.com's Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, aggregates products from over 500 retailers and combines this wide selection with 3D planning tools that let users view and share the rooms they create.''

Google x Twitter: Super Tuesday Maps

Click here to go to the map

holoCube

From holocube via Engadget