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Public Art, Sold to the Highest Bidder – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities
Strange idea (given historical notions of patronage), but interesting: selling public art that’s no longer wanted to private buyers.
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This is an idea that’s taken hold in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, where large-scale sculptures are installed for temporary display in a local park. Known as Patricia’s Green, the park plays host to a variety of art pieces, most of them brought about through the support of the Black Rocks Art Foundation, a group run by the organizers of the Burning Man festival. In coordination with the Hayes Valley Art Coalition, the group arranges for sculptures built for the Burning Man event to take on temporary residence in the park. Ranging from a few months to a few years, these residences end and new sculptures are installed.
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The Bitch Is Back – Magazine – The Atlantic
The paragraph below clips a more serious note, but read this article for its sardonic wit, too. It’s one hell of a ride, totally recommended.
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One could further argue that all of these menopausal women, in fact, represent a major evolutionary shift. Owing to women’s greatly lengthened lifespan (from about 40 in 1900 to 80 in 2000 in the U.S.), even the notion of what a woman’s so-called normal state is can be questioned: Northrup notes that before this time in history, most women never reached menopause—they died before it could arrive. If, in an 80-year life span, a female is fertile for about 25 years (let’s call it ages 15 to 40), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. Fertility is The Change. It is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm—the more standard state of selfishness is.Which is to say, if it comes at the right time, menopause is wisdom.
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Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute
Neal Stephenson nails it…
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We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a 35-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.
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and
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Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
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Audio archive now available online:
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Although we email, blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning Cathy N. Davidson — former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) — shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment, and suggests ways we can take control, based on her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.
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Will be live-streamed, Oct. 18 (Tuesday):
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Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) is one of the world’s top thinkers on cooperative structures. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, he uses evidence from neuroscience, economics, sociology, biology, and real-world examples to break down the myth of self-interest and replace it with a model of cooperation in our businesses, our government, and our lives.
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Generation X Stymied by Boomers – Bloomberg
Interesting article, but I was left confused by it: are Gen Xers pampered (high expectations) or totally under siege (bad timing, bad luck, bad future)?
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“You look at our generation and we’re on the cusp of financial disaster, and it’s the first time that the American dream isn’t what we all thought it was,” says Bryce Pickering, who has worked at Citigroup Inc. (C) in New York for 10 years and, at 32, is among its youngest managing directors.
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GPS Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams – Technology Review
The comments on this article are excellent (critical). Have to agree with the ones that criticize central planning. If zone 1 and 3 were connected directly (skipping zone 2), I bet it would be the same story as with building more and bigger roads…
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The researchers’ algorithms indicate when the network of roads and subway lines between two regions cannot support the number of people traveling between those regions. By pointing out underlying problems, the system shows urban planners where to focus their attention, Zheng says.In some cases, Zheng says, the busy regions aren’t really the ones that are flawed. For example, it may be that people from region 1 are going through region 2 on their way to region 3, in which case it may be better to connect region 1 and 3 directly, rather than trying to widen highways in region 2.
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