spencercritchley.com Archives: Technology
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7 April 2010
Op-Ed: Local think tank forming to take on sustainability
By now it’s clear that the future of the economy is a sustainable one, as global investment trends attest. As the cost of cleaner technologies falls ever lower, sustainability is becoming a question not of limits, but of opportunities.
Imagine, then, the possibilities for a region that combined these assets: world-class academic and defense institutions, excellent infrastructure, a coastal California/Pacific Rim location, some of the most fertile land in the world, a culture of innovation, and a quality of life that attracts talent from all over the planet.
There is such a region: We live in it.
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24 December 2009
Why TV commercials are so loud
With Rep. Anna Eshoo’s bill to turn down TV ads in the news (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, or CALM, Act), here again is my explanation of why ads sound so loud when broadcasters claim they hit the same levels as the rest of the programming: People have complained about loud TV commercials for years. The [...]
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22 November 2009
Local Government 2.0
Government 2.0 is a big interest of mine – just like at the national level, I think we can make local government more open, participatory and productive by using technology intelligently. Although there’s been talk about this for a while, it’s still early days – e.g. see the new discussion, “What Is Government 2.0?” at [...]
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28 May 2009
Google Wave Preview
via wave.google.com Tim O’Reilly: “Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, [...]
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25 May 2009
A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
via alistapart.com A great post on why attractive design is more useful, by UI consultant Stephen P. Anderson. Emotions are not just the waste heat of cognition, they’re essential to cognition. So attractive products are not just “more fun” to use, they actually work better. Posted via web from Spencer’s posterous
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15 December 2007
The Desert Mothers release “Nowhere Motel”
My new band The Desert Mothers has a new release, “Nowhere Motel”, which I’m really excited about – give it a listen.Dieselbe Farbe 10 und Bube gegen verschiedene Farben Bube und König – Wenn es keine Flush Straf-Karte gibt, dann online poker spielen 10, Bube. Here’s our web site, which has a music player on [...]
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11 May 2007
Digital Journalism Case Study: Live Blogging a Political Convention
The California Democratic Party held its annual convention in San Diego April 27-29, and I was there blogging, along with hundreds of other traditional and web-based reporters. Here are some observations. < – First, a thought about this picture: No matter how much technology finds its way into campaigns and campaign coverage, politics is ultimately [...]
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31 March 2007
The News Business Is Broken in the Digital Age – If You’re an “ee”, Not If You’re an “er”
Via Tim O’Reilly’s blog I come across San Francisco Chronicle publisher Phil Bronstein, predicting layoffs and saying the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it… And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.” Meanwhile, according to a Zogby Poll I find in the Financial Times, “Newspaper editors are [...]
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13 March 2006
Strip Away The Production, Reveal The Great Song Within
I’ve been listening to Moments From This Theater: Live, a wonderful album by the great Memphis/Muscle Shoals songwriters Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. It’s just the two of them, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar and electric piano, recorded at 1998 shows in Ireland and England. They play classics including “Dark End Of The Street”, “Do [...]
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11 March 2006
Digital Politics
From my O’Reilly blog: I’ve been doing more and more work in politics since the ’04 election (communications consulting and web production). I got involved at first out of a sense of civic obligation–and because my wife told me to “stop ranting and go volunteer”. I expected to dread a lot of what I’d encounter, [...]