Month: May 2004

Throwing away something valuable?

NY WasteMatch Materials Exchange
From the site:
One companyís by-products can be another companyís raw materials. The Materials Exchange is a free service that matches generators of valuable commercial waste and surplus goods with organizations that can reuse them. Waste producers sell what they once paid to throw away; reusers obtain materials for free or at low prices.

Microsoft Research: building a Memex

Stuff I’ve Seen – Home Page
More about Vannevar Bush’s Memex
From the site:
SIS is a prototype tool that makes it easy for you to find information you’ve seen before, whether it came as email, attachments, files, web pages, appointments, tablet journal entries, etc. We do this by providing a single unified stored of different sources and providing an interface with quick sorting, filtering, previews and thumbnails.

A nation of debtors

Maxed Out Generation – A Consumer Debt Blog
I’ve been thinking about the massive debt that I have incurred as a result of school. It was quite a wake-up call for me to look at the total owed on credit cards and student loans in relation to my income (which is $0 right now) and monthly expenses.
This blog offers a sympathetic human perspective to the problem.
From the blog:
Millions of people are caught in the trap of credit dependence. There is a silent epidemic of shame and anxiety because our society perpetuates the belief that this problem is self-inflicted, that people who have debts are deadbeats. Meanwhile, credit card companies keep coming up with new ways to deceive us and to keep us locked in debt, with the help of our lawmakers. This blog explores the human side of debt, what the credit industry doesn’t want us to know, and strategies for survival.

Clay’s talk about games, rules, code and the real world

Shirky: Nomic World: By the players, for the players
In this talk (edited version online), Clay Shirky discusses code as the rules and structure of virtual worlds (online multiplayer games). Much is stated about the structure that these worlds might assume if control was given to the players and what the out-comes might be. In the end he states: “We should experiment with game-world models that dump a large and maybe even unpleasant amount of control into the hands of the players because it’s the best lab we have for experiments with real governance in the 21st century agora, the place where people gather when they want to be out in public. “