NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafés, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants – whose identities remain unknown to one another – agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 – 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.

Via Andrea’s del.icio.us page

While discussing geography, one of my classmates pitched an idea she’d like to try: follow a homeless person around for a day with a GPS, mapping their use of space (with consent, of course). Where do they really go? Where would they want you to think they go? I often think of the homeless as landscape fixtures, which is dehumanizing, but as much a product of their geographic consistency as of my lack of empathy.

So I figured this kind of thing must have been done, and a quick search turned up the animated heat map of the homeless in LA above. As with any heat map it’s mostly interpolation, but the movement over the course of several months is interesting. One of the cartographers that worked on it has some interesting comments on the process, too. SFGate has a less interesting and less detailed map of the homeless in SF. I think the much smaller scale of my classmate’s idea would be somewhat more personal and interesting, but I couldn’t find something like it in my hardly exhaustive 3 mins of search.

On a related note, the City of Berkeley is mounting an unfunded effort to crack down on public madness and panhandling. The curious can find the proposal and (5 hours!) of video from the March 13th City Council meeting on the City website.

Thanks, Lynette and Brian!

I must admit, I love HBO’s The Sopranos.

The season finale and last nine episodes begins in April. I’ve grown to love this show and agree with an article in this month’s Vanity Fair (“The Family that Preys Together”) that maintains it’s the best dramatic television show of all time and certainly what has transitioned HBO from a feature-and-fight network to probably one of the best producers of original adult content on television. I’ve even grown to think a bit like Tony Soprano.

One thing is for sure: the amount of Italian food in this show is immense and mouth watering. From Sfogliatelle to Chicken Marsala to Baked Ziti. So, as an ode to The Sopranos here’s an easy recipe for a popular dish on the show, Baked Ziti. It’s not necessarily cheap but it is quick, yummy and will feed an army of mob soldiers for days.

Continue reading ‘Baked Ziti: Ode to the Sopranos’

This week, the Arkansas State Legislature erased a question mark that had been on the state’s identity since its founding in 1836, and added an apostrophe. A bill on its way to the governor’s office declares that the official possessive form of Arkansas is Arkansas’s. Is the stuff of style guides information? Of course! And they came down on the side of the big dog.

Thanks for everything, NPR.

in this series of palindrome based music, well… uh… i don’t have any… what?

…

well, here’s some pop music to break up that awkward silence.

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The Awkward Stage – “The Morons are Winning”

i wrote my first greasemonkey script. for those who aren’t familiar, greasemonkey is a firefox extension that allows the user to run scripts that programmatically change the current web page on the fly.

see the wikipedia page.

and download the extension here.

anyhoo, i spent a short while this weekend whipping together monkeybarrel. (click here to install)

monkeybarrel is a script allows the user to discover more greasemonkey scripts. for a given page that you visit, it searches userscripts.org to see if there are any scripts that apply to the page. if the script turns up some results, it links you to them.

i think if people knew about more scripts, greasemonkey would take off, as being able to edit a page is a powerful thing. this is my attempt to help that:

another great greasemonkey script that nfultz hacked together a berkeley version of a script that inserts a library link in amazon.com book pages. (click here to install)

you guys see any other uses for greasemonkey? i like to think of it as inverse screen scraping: instead of taking this html and finding some programmatic way to to pull out data and strip out formatting, you have a script that edits or inserts stuff in your page, fitting into the formatting in in a nice way.

UPDATE: userscripts.org had to disable installation of MonkeyBarrel, because it generated server load and created other issues. Please get the new version that doesn’t slam servers.

That’s KAPer as in a practitioner of Kite Aerial Photography (KAP), not a misspelled pickled flower bud. Yesterday the GIIF-CAMFER GeoLunch featured Charles “Cris” Benton, an architecture professor here at UC Berkeley who’s become well-known for helping to revive the lost art of taking pictures from kites. His talk was fantastic, broaching not only the fascinating DIY technical innovations he’s made in kite design and camera cradles, but also the history of KAP (and other non-plane aerial photography, like pigeons with exploding powder-charged flashes), the social impact and perception of the practice, and the artistic implications of taking landscape photos from a perspective that is not your own.

Continue reading ‘Confessions of a KAPer’

According to an estimate shown on BBC’s One Planet, a third of all food in the developed world gets dumped. A lot of food goes waste in the developing world as well. But the reasons for wastage are vastly different. In the developing world, a lot of the wastage is because of inefficiencies in supply chain, inadequate refrigeration facilities etc, where as in the developed world, a large chunk of the wastage is at the household level. For instance, in UK alone, out of US$ 38 billion worth of annual food wastage, the retail-store sell-by expiry contribution was a mere $3.54 billion !! They clearly got their act together.

As you might have guessed, information can play an enormous role in minimizing waste in both worlds. A little e-chart on the refrigerator that keeps a tab on expiring foods can be an approach. Another approach could be letting people know the amount of energy and water spent in growing all that food. For example, fruits take water 100+ times their weight. A lot of developed countries import food (as shown in this map) which means wastage of water at places where its usually scarce.

One key insight from both IS210 and IS243 has been: “The key to supply chain optimization isn’t moving things faster according to plans, it is moving things smarter according to actual demand” (which implies its more about managing information than actual physical goods). Corporates in developed world have realized and enormously benefited from this for a long time. Besides not seeing any benefit from this realization, developing world poses another significant problem. Its really hard to see an end-to-end system where there are a million different vendors and farmers both of whom have little holdings and revenues. It’s a challenging problem and pay-offs can be as large as significant elimination of global poverty and hunger.

In a staggeringly progressive attempt to conserve energy (read: transfer use from PM to AM), Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which moves Daylight Saving Time back to the first week of March. Remember when DST started at the end of April and reset at the beginning of October? “Summer” is now 4 months longer than it was when I was born.

Set your clocks ahead on Sunday morning, y’all.

Spying on Judd in class today, I realized he has started a new blog with Fiore concerning the defining culinary delicacy of their homeland, perhaps of this entire country: barbeque. Behold: bbq.isgoodfor.us. For those unaware, barbeque is not technically burgers and hot dogs. That’s grilling. BBQ is slow and low, meat smoked for hours, infused with the smoke of your favorite tree, covered with a dry rub or sauce. It’s big, bold, complex, religious, obsessive, and fundamentally American. Why it hasn’t really caught on in the Bay Area remains a mystery to me, but perhaps our Carolinan iSchool brethren can lead us to the hidden local bastions of tender smoked meat.