randomosity

Mechanical Turk

One of the most fascinating stores in Paris and well worth a visit is Colette. The location is prime - along rue Saint-Honoré near the Place du Marche Saint-Honoré. Colette carries a wonderfully eclectic inventory of things amazing. catering to a diverse clientèle from the curious, the tourist to the glitteratti, the hand-picked items in store are displayed creatively and offer the finest of the trendiest.
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What’s Stopping You?

Volvo Hybrid!

I threw this link into an aside, and then thought better of it. It might get lost there, and this latest post from the consistently pragmatic Dustin Wax on Taking Better Notes has a plethora of great tips. He also introduces the Cornell System for notetaking which I find quite intriguing and well worth a look.
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Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of data liberation. His talks have seemingly inspired the UN to release public health data that had been kept a guarded secret. Armed with this data he has created a wonderful flash based data animation tool called GapMinder. The tool is fun to play with if only purely from a visualization perspective. That he has provided UN worldwide data on matters such as infant mortality, carbon emissions and wealth, allows a layperson such as myself to explore the relationship between these variables for individual countries.

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I attended a wildly animated, wonderfully amusing and thought provoking keynote talk by David Weinberger entitled ’The Business of the Miscellaneous’ at the Annual General Meeting of the CIRA this afternoon. Weinberger claims that society has solved the threat posed by information overload by creating more information. Additionally, he claims, the blurring of the line between the metadata and the actual data has further eroded the authority of the traditional media and given a newfound credibility to sources such as Wikipedia. A credibility that he asserts that comes from trust built on transparency.
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Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a variety of media and we patiently wait and often salivate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be notified when a service becomes more mature. Invites create a buzz and certainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this marketing strategy. I will admit to being a victim of much marketing. I like my toys. There’s a new service that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sacred sites: Mashable Invites.
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