A Melbourne icon was shut down recently due to damages that were apparently too severe to bother fixing, but thankfully for the otherwise stunning Southern Star Observation Wheel, a few good men and women have their gears going about what to do next. Designer Büro North, who also dreamed up the VEIL Solar Shades, has a most splendorous idea of how to turn a broken ride into something that actually benefits local citizens. Obviously everything’s still a pipe dream for now, but said dream involves strapping solar sails onto the sides and creating a wind-driven energy generation machine that pulls juice from two renewable sources. And let’s be honest, you’d totally ride this — risks be darned.
Melbourne’s decommissioned Observation Wheel re-imagined as energy-making windmill originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google quickly launched a Person Finder to help reunite people separated by this morning’s earthquake in Chile. The site has two options: I’m looking for someone and I have information about someone. If you’re trying to get information or have any information about anyone affected, it looks like a good place to check in. Google has also put together a few other resources for Chile earthquake response, including a Google Map with earthquake information and a couple of donation buttons for Unicef and DirectRelief International. [Google Person Finder: Chile Earthquake via Mashable]
This morning’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile has left in its wake a whole lot of destruction in Chile and impending tsunamis across the Pacific. Weblog Mashable rounds up a few options for keeping up with the latest news with real-time web resources.
Mashable’s Pete Cashmore suggests several real-time sources for keeping up with what’s happening with the tsunami, including a page of live streaming video coverage via Ustream, the Twitter #tsunami hashtag, real-time results from Google, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) tsunami warning center.
Know of a better resource where concerned or affected parties can keep up with the latest news and warnings? Share it in the comments.
Good luck sorting this one out, short-sighted lawmakers. An upcoming piece of major legislation in the UK, called the Digital Economy Bill, would essentially force all public wi-fi points offline by requiring impossibly high levels of copyright protection. The bill, which bears some similarity to the controversial DMCA here in the US, is ostensibly aimed at providing copyright holders the means of controlling their content online.
But while an ISP may detect a violation by one of its subscribers and send a nastygram to the appropriate party, it’s difficult to do that when your “subscriber” is a pub or café that offers free wi-fi to customers. If someone buys a cup of coffee, downloads a few songs, and then leaves and never returns, who is at fault? According to the Digital Economy Bill, the café.
Read the rest of this story on CrunchGear…
Twitter appears to be on the verge of some big changes to its website if a tweet that Twitter engineer Alex Payne sent today is any indication. In fact, the new features may be so good that they could make some people re-examine their use of desktop Twitter clients, apparently. As Payne writes:
If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)
Not surprisingly, that tweet had a few third-party Twitter developers worried.
“@al3x as a developer, i’m not sure how to take that looming tweet….,” wrote developer Chad Etzel (who actually used to work part-time at Twitter). Payne immediately repsonded, “@jazzychad I don’t mean that developers won’t be able to compete with the site. We still release most everything API-first, of course.“
Apple’s famous desire for total control over its operations seems to have extended to its manufacturing facilities as we’ve come across Cupertino’s Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report, which details audits the American company has done of its overseas suppliers and the failures identified therein. The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple’s already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit). Apple is, predictably, not jazzed about the situation, and has taken action through train-the-trainer schemes, threats of business termination with recidivist plants, and — most notably — the recovery of $2.2 million in recruitment fees that international contract workers should not have had to pay.
It should come as no shock to learn that cheaper overseas factories are cutting illegal corners, but it’s disappointing to hear Apple’s note that most of the 102 audited manufacturers said Cupertino was the only vendor to perform such rigorous compliance checks. Still, we’ll take what we can get and the very existence of this report — which can be savagely skewed to defame Apple’s efforts (as demonstrated expertly by The Daily Telegraph below) — is an encouraging sign that corporate responsibility is being taken seriously. We hope, wherever your geek loyalties and fervor may lie, that you’ll agree Apple’s leading in the right direction and that its competitors should at the very least have matching monitoring schemes. They may have to swallow some bad PR at first, but sweeping up the dirty details of where gadgets come from is juvenile and has no place in a civilized world. Hit the source link for the full report. Read the rest of this entry »
Anyone who has lived in New York, knows the hassle and stress of finding an apartment that fits within their budgets and has enough space to live in. New startup Naked Apartments attempts to ease the process by being a sort of Match.com for renters and landlords and apartment brokers. The site matches qualified renters with brokers and landlords, automating the process of finding an apartments that meet renters’ search criteria.
Here’s how it works. Renters sign up, creating anonymous profiles that feature key statistics such as annual income, desired monthly rent, their desired apartment size, location and move-in date. Naked Apartments will also supplement that information with a free credit check, which means that the completed profile includes a renter’s credit score range. Brokers and landlords can get access to the anonymous profiles and choose to contact the renters that meet their financial requirements and have matching interests in their rental properties.
The catch is that brokers and landlords have to buy credits in order to contact each renter. Landlords pay $2 to contact a renter. Once a brokers contact renters with their rental properties, renters can choose whom to exchange contact information with and which apartments to see. The idea is that after renters work with a broker or landlord, they write reviews of their experience, helping other renters know which brokers and landlords to trust and how to navigate the waters
A new method of ultrafast cooling helps living cells, such as eggs, survive frozen storage better.
Facebook’s new patent on publishing streams of user activities has many worried for online innovation. But it could be worse.
Twitter is reportedly set to introduce tiny text ads that come with search results. They learned it from watching you, Google.
