PUBLIC MARKS with search crisis

Criticism • Side effects often dominate over intended consequences of any project or endeavor. • Abstract views may make us callous or may badly reflect ground truth. • Ignorance is bliss. The world is filled with sob stories. Best to not dwell? • Such services may be used solely for the most banal aspirations and goals. • Struggle may be important - making things too easy may harm fitness and lower diversity of skills and abilities over long term. • What about poor people who are outside of any implied technological social network? • Why not just help people around you? • Any technology should go hand in hand with day to day personal practice that is unmediated? • Feedback loops may be created that accelerate and disrupt society. • Virtual and visual only for curators; not tactile; uses only one sense. A concern?

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

Korean artist Do-Ho Suh’s work looks like eye candy, but reads like a masterpiece. Every sculpture is intricately crafted to raise questions about individuality and anonymity. In our contemporary, overpopulated world, is it even possible to stand out, or are we all part of a collective machine? In many of his deceptively simple sculptures, thousands of singular pieces are linked together to form one overarching statement.

I guess I've been spoiled by the (comparatively) pure joy of configuring, maintaining and running my code on Debian based distributions.

Tellement vrai. En même temps des clients insistent bien pour avoir des serveurs sous Windows, CentOS n'est pas pire à maintenir.

If the Guardian's Apocalypse Survival Guide models a return to the land on a dystopian Hobbesian-Hollywood model of selfishness and violence, Hatake No Uta goes completely the other way. Here, survival in the countryside is a matter of semi-religious respect for nature, love of food, poetry, gentleness, wholesomeness, teamwork, beautiful scenery, simple, heart-warming people, something utopian. Now, sure, I wouldn't know country life if it bit me on the nose. But I do recognise cultural difference when I see it.

I welcome there being cultural differences in the ways we respond to the current crisis, because differences mean choices.

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, where we are building a platform that crowdsources crisis information.

We can now add colleges and universities to the list of victims of the financial crisis. The stock-market collapse has badly eroded endowments, forcing schools to suspend capital projects, freeze hiring, rethink need-blind financial-aid policies and cut budgets. The Journal reported this week that Harvard University's giant-killer endowment, which stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, has lost 22% of its value in the months since and that the university's administration is planning for a 30% decline for the fiscal year ending next June.

What saddens me, is to see how our own crisis has been manufactured out of political opportunism and miscalculation.

Washington Mutual, with $307 billion in assets, is by far the biggest bank failure in history, eclipsing the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in Chicago, an event that presaged the savings and loan crisis. IndyMac, which was seized by regulators in July, was one-tenth the size of WaMu.