Around the corner from where I live in Toronto

The Worldbank, an international financial institution that provides leveraged loans to developing countries for capital programs has just released data.worldbank.org, a website that provides free, open and easy access to statistics and indicators about development. While the idea is not particularly novel (think of UNData, Google Public Data, data.gov and many others) the World Bank Data website seems unique by the combination of offering free datasets and indicators as well as a compelling visual interface for open data exploration. Many indicators are also available to developers to create new data applications and visualizations through an Application Programming Interface (API).

I loathe Apple products, and chafe under the straightjacket of their aesthetic whenever I use one.  I simply happen to despise their competition that much more.  At least Apple has an aesthetic.  Its works, however flawed, are the works of a person, rather than an amorphous blob.

As cities become smarter, urban living becomes much more efficient, and in many ways more pleasurable. With the street being a platform for technology, it becomes much easier to know where the things we want are and who has them and how they’re using them. We’re used to thinking of convenience in a 20th century way, where you get in your car and you drive around until you find the thing you want, and convenience is defined by the easiest drive with the least traffic, by the object that you buy and take home so you never have to worry about where it is (driving to the store to buy a home gym). Convenience in a smarter city is defined differently: knowing where the stuff you want is at all times so you don’t actually need to own it or make long trips to get to it. Just as search engines like Google have allowed us to find what we want, instead of having to click through the Net hoping to find something without knowing where it is, ubiquitous technology makes the city increasingly "searchable."

The towns that chocolate built are a curious blend of idealistic vision and pragmatic company town—the convergence of paternalistic benevolence and capitalist expedience.

my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

I happen to work in one and interruptions are the biggest hindrance to getting work done there (aside from an IT bureaucracy that is in the dark ages).  

At its core, photography is a mixture of art and science. The art world understands the ‘art’ half of photography but doesn’t understand the ‘science’ half. A photograph is a one-to-one mapping of a scene that is in front of a camera. If the scene has been created especially to be photographed, then photography is just being used as one of many image-creating techniques which carry no different meanings from each other. When the scene in front of the lens is not directorially created, though, it has a scientific, evidentiary, documentary value - it is a record of fact which can be analyzed, and from which discoveries can be made.

As soon as the iPad was first announced by Apple earlier this year, well-respected technology writers—programmers with a penchant for open source software, in most cases—voiced their fears and frustrations about the product and the associated platform. It subconsciously scared them, as the iPad represented the first real computer that anyone could use, eroding their lifelong-built reputation as computer expert. As if using an iPad would already make anyone an expert, but I digress.

Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.

I'm curious to see how this plays out in the future, espeically in large organizations that are most often than not slower on the uptake of new technology. I'm sitting here at my old computer in my cubicle using Windows XP and forced (due to IT policies) to uuse IE6. We'll be getting brand new computers next month, and guess what...we'll still be using Windows XP and IE6.

A new generation of workers I think will no longer stand for the glacial pace and central control that characterizes IT in large organizations.

Relying on the US media to learn about the world results in cluelessness.  They wash the news until no color remains, nothing unsettling to our sensibilities.

Lately, the word on the Street is: jobs boom. 

What's interesting is that analysts are far more bullish than economists proper about the prospects of jobs booming once again. The consensus amongst economists, I think, is far more pessimistic.

Here's what's really happening. We're trading yesterday's jobs - relatively high value, secure, jobs, with career paths and safety nets, of a sort, at least - for the opposite: low value, insecure, often temporary, narrow, and limited jobs, with no safety nets, and little skills gains. 

We are, in short, trading real jobs for McJobs. The so-called jobs boom is, examined more closely, a Big Bang of McJobs. That conclusion's as tight as a drum: the rational person needs only to look at the underemployment numbers to see it confirmed.

"...A measure of underemployment that counts those people has almost doubled over the past two years, to 15.6 percent."

The question is: why a Big Bang in McJobs? The answer's simple. Yesterday's industrial economy is today's zombieconomy. Yesterday's businesses are slowly but surely dying, and the entire base of the economy is in decay. Replacing real jobs with McJobs is just another way to keep it afloat a few months longer.

The real problem is this. We haven't reinvented the economy for the 21st century. When we create tomorrow's industries, tomorrow's jobs will appear in droves. Until we do, though the numbers may show a "jobs boom", there will be little gains in the real economy to match. 

McJobs, after all, are no path to prosperity - just a path to the acceleration of decline.