Watching Earth ~ NASA ISS & Shuttle Views...

NASA APOD spotlights lovely Earth at Night timelapse... And see also key Earth features called out...

Ed Boyden ~ MIT Neuroengineer on CNN Ideas

Nice piece by Elizabeth Landau on CNN Ideas spotlighting MIT neuroengineering colleague Ed Boyden...

"The seeds of Boyden's career were planted in childhood. Growing up north of Dallas, he wanted to understand something about humanity and why we are here. He liked math better than science at first: "Math was the way of getting to the inner truth of things," he said. But then he wanted to know how our minds are able to understand math. His thoughts gave way to an idea he now calls the "loop of understanding": Math is how we understand things at a deep level, our minds do math, the brain gives rise to our minds, biology governs our brains, chemistry implements biology, the principles of physics rule over chemistry, and physics run on math. It's a loop from math to math, with all the knowledge in between. "I don't think I came up with that eloquent way to describe it until I actually came to MIT, but yeah, I was very interested in these kinds of things as a young teenager."

ColaLife ~ Coke Distributes AidPod Health Kits...

WIRED's Tim Maly writes about Clever Packaging: Essential Medicine Rides Coke’s Distribution Into Remote Villages...

"Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola’s distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most. You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. [...] ColaLife began collaborating with one of Coca-Cola’s African bottler/distributors, and the beverage giant shared advice and information about how its distribution network operates. [...] The result of their efforts so far is the AidPod, a wedge-shaped container that fits between the necks of bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. For the pilot program, they are using the AidPods to distribute an anti-diarrhea kit, called “Kit Yamoyo” (“Kit of Life”). The AidPod’s are a clever packaging solution, born of a very particular design problem. Because the vision was to physically piggyback on Coke’s distribution system, they needed to work with the crates used to move the popular soda to retailers. Initial designs experimented with pouches on the side and tubes that could be slotted in place of a bottle. Neither option would have worked, as both would have meant less space for Coke. Then, genius struck. “My wife said, ‘Why don’t we make use of the unused space?’” says Berry."

Nice!

MemTable ~ Seth Hunter's Group Thinkertool...

Check out Seth Hunter's still-impressive Media Lab Master's thesis from 2009, the MemTable...

"...an interactive touch table that supports co-located group meetings by capturing both digital and physical interactions in its memory. Everyone can be a scribe at the MemTable. The goal of the project is to demonstrate hardware and software design principles that integrate recording, recalling, and reflection during the life cycle of a project in one tabletop system. [...] MemTable poses an important question to HCI designers:  How can the multi-person interactions we design be integrated with our workpractices into systems which have history and memory? What is the social computing space of the future?"

Japan Economy Map ~ Firm Logos Geolocated

In sister map to German Economy Map, here Map Porn spots Japanese firm HQ's via logos placed on map of the home islands...

Icey Timelapses ~ Ginormous Glacial Shiftings...

Several timelapse videos showing massive glacial shifts, first gCaptain spots NASA Earth Observatory clip of Extensive Ice Fractures in the Beaufort Sea... Chasing Ice spots huge glacier calving... Ice Action Compilation...

Power of Nature ~ BBC on Earth Ecosystems...

Check out lovely BBC series on the Power of Nature...

Pope of Foam ~ On The Art and Science of Beer

io9 spots the Pope of Foam revealing the art and science of beer...

Normal Cycling ~ Wagenbuur Spots NL Rushours

Just a couple nice pieces by Mark Wagenbuur showing normal cycling in the Netherlands. First, in his latest video he spotlights rush hour in Amsterdam... And second, in this older video, he shows Cycling in the rain in Utrecht... Note how unremarkable and civilized this all is.

Thought For Food ~ Innovation Challenge 2013

Thought For Food launches their innovation challenge 2013 which...

"...calls on students from universities around the world to form teams and produce a robust project proposal -- consisting of a business plan and creative pitch -- that presents an unexpected and out-of-the-box solution to the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050."

Freedom in the 50 States ~ Mercatus Rankings...

Dan Mitchell of International Liberty spotlights Mercatus Center's Ranking the States for Economic and Personal Freedom...

More How It's Made ~ UD on Everyday Artifacts!

Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting a whole series of the fantastic How It's Made videos, including a whole bunch on everyday artifacts, starting with Zippers... Carpets... Ballpoint Pens... Mirrors...

Found in a Crowd ~ De-Anonymizing Mobile Data

MIT Media Lab colleagues Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and Cesar Hidalgo plus collaborators write in their recent Scientific Reports paper Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility about the ease of de-anonymizing mobile data...

"We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. [...] even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals."

Several nice pieces have explored the implications of this work, including the BBC's Science and technology reporter Jason Palmer's Mobile location data 'present anonymity risk' and MIT's own Larry Hardesty asking How hard is it to 'de-anonymize' cellphone data?

IllumiRoom ~ Microsoft's Immersive Gamespace

Interesting to see Microsoft's IllumiRoom futuregaming projectorama in piece by GameDynamo's JC Marx... And here's full demo...

Flying Paper ~ Resilient Creative Kids Make Kites!

Check out latest trailer from upcoming Flying Paper kids and kites documentary by MIT Media Lab alum Nitin Sawhney and colleague Roger Hill premiering at the London Palestine Film Festival on May 7th, 2013...

"While the record-breaking event is what drives the film’s narrative arc, it is the everyday stories of the young kite makers that will touch audiences through their humor and playful spirit. The film seeks to humanize the conflict through a touching cinematic rendering of the fascinating kite culture among children as a form of creative resistance in Gaza."

Shark Food ~ Great Whites Sample SA's Seals!

Photographer Chris McClennan spots shark smorgasbord... And ITM Phantom camera captures these morsels in motion...

Stop The Cyborgs ~ Neo-Luddite Manifesto...

Neo-Luddite manifesto seeks to Stop The Cyborgs writes BBC in Privacy 'impossible' with Google Glass warn campaigners...

"The warning comes from a group called "Stop the Cyborgs" that wants limits put on when headsets can be used. It has produced posters so premises can warn wearers that the glasses are banned or recording is not permitted. [...] The limits that the Stop The Cyborg campaign wants placed on Google Glass and similar devices would involve a clear way to let people know when they are being recorded. "It's important for society and democracy that people can chat and live without fear that they might end up being published or prosecuted," [...] "We are not anti-technology, we just want people to realise that technology is a powerful cultural force which shapes our society and which we can also shape."

Right to Stay ~ Fighting Kenyan Slum Evictions...

MIT Urban Africa's Ben Bradlow spots The Right to Stay...

Comet PANSTARRS ~ Chris Cook's Sunset Foto

Lovely foto by Chris Cook of Comet PANSTARRS on NASA APOD...

Steve Jobs ~ Collection of Docu's and Best Of's...

Steve Jobs ~ One Last Thing... BBC's Steve Jobs ~ Billion Dollar Hippy... Bloomberg Game Changers: Steve Jobs... Steve Jobs Building NeXT... NeXT, OpenStep and the return of Steve Jobs to Apple... Steve Jobs 1986 PBS Documentary... Steve Jobs rare footage... Celebrating Steve Jobs ~ a special memorial event...