Just saw the RIAA’s top 25 list of universities that have received the most copyright infringement notices, and the MPAA’s version of the same list. An interesting follow-up to the stern warning from Berkeley the student body received a week back.

My alma mater doesn’t make the list, though the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (where I spent much of my middle/high school years) is way up there. Go Vols?

Berkeley isn’t even on the RIAA’s target list, though it does straggle in at #25 on the MPAA list (Stanford barely edges out UCB with 7 more notices). It is not indicative of “which institutions are the worst infringers”, though. Just the ones that have been caught the most, I suppose.

Patrick Blanc overgrows the vertical surfaces of buildings in the most beautiful way. What he creates is far away from any fancy horticultural show, his Vertical Garden could rather be called eco-art, or greener architecture consisting of a variety of plants trailing gently up any interior or outside wall. Imagine the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon but this time on modern concrete buildings.

Read the rest of the article at Ping. I’d love to see some of these on campus. Beats the pants off ivy. Nothing is more infuriating than ivy wearing pants…

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack

Splitter Hack

Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Each one of us had windows startup music blare in public places (like libraries) at least once or twice. Here’s a little hack to avoid it. Just keep a headphone jack splitter always plugged in.

A dog owner in the US state of Maryland says her golden retriever Toby saved her from choking to death by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre.

Debbie Parkhurst, 45, said she was eating an apple at home last Friday when a piece became lodged in her throat and she began to choke.

Ms Parkhurst said she pounded on her own chest but could not move the piece.

Toby joined in, jumping on her chest and dislodging the apple, then licking her face so she would not pass out.

link

reverse angle

One of the nice things about the San Francisco Bay Area is its vast array of gorgeous open space. Yesterday, a few friends and I literally stopped to smell the flowers out at Mount Diablo State Park.

The amount of colorful life in this area is really something. In addition to wildflowers in the east bay, there are mushrooms down low in the north bay, eagles up high in the south bay.

But what of the city itself?

(cc) patrick boury

Today I explored a whole different side to open space in the bay area: public urban green-space. Spots such as the Yerba Buena Gardens and Golden Gate Park are well known, but there are many hidden green gems in even the densest urban areas of San Francisco. By city ordinance, newly built or renovated buildings must dedicate a portion of their square footage to open space that is publicly accessible. Rick Evans of SFCityGuides.com writes that while developers will fulfill their legal responsibility in creating these spaces, they often keep these small gardens and parks unadvertised. Evans maintains that in order to find these quiet gems, you have to poke around, ask questions and overcome the “I don’t belong here” feeling.

Knowing (the location of the park) is often half the battle. And there are a variety of ways to find them, from browsing online satellite images to observing the high perimeters from the sidewalks. But sometimes you have to push open an unmarked door, wander to the end of a hallway or go to an odd floor in a tall building to find these secret patches of green.

A sample:
The sun terrace at the famous Crown Zellerbach building features a peaceful tree-lined seating area, a stunning view of the cityscape (including a full-length look at the iconic Transamerica tower), a small monument to our first president — all on the 15th floor.

Also, there’s a small rooftop cafe at a SF art school that features a Diego Rivera fresco and cheap bites to eat.

But I’m not going to be that guy that spills the beans. The value of these places is in the secrecy.

Many of you will be pleased just to know that these emerald patches exist. For those that must explore, I’ve compiled a map (using this handy mapping tool) of some of the hidden urban parks and rooftop gardens. If you’d like to browse the compilation, or add your own secret spots, please leave a comment here, or drop us a line: localoaf at free-google-email-domain dot com.

The immensely talented design collective Worther’s Original have created an installation called Shadow Monsters. It’s a processing app that augments your shadow puppetry with reactive audio and animation…live, on the fly.

Shadow Monsters evoked the same astonishment I felt the first time I saw my fingers’ shadows rearrange themselves into an uncannily lifelike nether-bunny hopping across my bedroom wall. Only now the bunny has fangs and throbbing tendrils.

If my fellow oafs will forgive the self-endorsement, I’d like to present a musical offering. My band, Secret Name Name, has a myspace page and I’ve just uploaded some new songs. Enjoy!

Secret Name Name - “Firewalk”

Just walking down a city street we enter and exit dozens of wi-fi networks. Ill-equipped to detect them ourselves, the Trace project uses wireless enabled PDAs to map them out. Beautiful (yet rather useless) visualizations of various journeys. Made by the folks at Stamen Design. (Ooh! They’re hiring!)

Stamen Design is also behind Splatter, which should waste about . . . 10 seconds of your time. Far less time than I’ve spent staring at Sexy Mario.

Thanks to the inimitable Things Magazine.

D’you ever get disoriented (or excited) when the same word or phrase is typeset exactly on top of itself in two successive lines of text? I found this paragraph this evening, with five informations in a row! Oddly enough, it was the result of a search for “information overload.” Remarkable? maybe. Loafable? absolutely.

Thanks, Google Scholar and Health Libraries Group.

(c) 2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

In my user interface class this morning, our professor mentioned research showing that Asians tend to focus more on background elements in images than on foreground objects. The research was done in 2005 by psychologists at the University of Michigan. Here’s the article in PNAS, for those with journal access. Essentially, they tracked eye movement of American graduate students and Chinese grad students (all at U. of M.) while showing them images of animals with and without backgrounds. They also showed pictures of animals participants had already seen and asked them to register recognition. They found that Americans tend to focus on the foreground object sooner (we’re talking milliseconds here) and fixate on it longer, while the Chinese students glanced toward the background much more often. The graph above compares the number of times participants from the two groups participants looked at the foreground object at time intervals over 3 seconds from initial exposure. More recent fMRI work has shown that the two groups also activate different regions of the brain when performing similar tasks.

Continue reading ‘Focus on the Foreground?’