Essa é daquelas idéias irritantes, que merecem ser ovacionadas.
Helsinki provavelmente será a cidade com o maior data center do mundo. Os nórdicos, pois, colocaram seus neurônios para funcionar:
Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki’s most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channelled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.
“It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls,” said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia. Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.
Foda, né? Pois saiba que os data centers do mundo espalhados por aí já gastam 1% da energia consumida pelo mundo.
Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the internet as a central repository for the world’s data and processing — known as “cloud computing”.
Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations’ energy bills.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world’s energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.
Mais números para mostrar o quão foda é essa idéia:
One major problem is that in a typical data centre only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing — the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
“It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers,” said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa Inc.
A visualização de dados abaixo é de uma elegância que constrange.
The preceding description of the world doesn’t share the same scientific view that we have, in which the Earth is one planet around one sun in a universe full of suns and planets. The ancient picture of the universe portrays a world in which the Earth is a disc surrounded by water not only on the sides, but underneath and above as well. A firm bowl (the firmament) keeps the upper waters back but has gates to let the rain and snow through. The Sun, Moon, and stars move in fixed tracks along the underside of this bowl. From below the disc, the waters break through as wells, rivers and the ocean, but the Earth stands firm on pillars sunk into the waters like the pillings of a pier. Deep below the Earth is Sheol, the abode of the dead, which can be entered only through the grave.
Para ler o resto da explicação, clique aqui.
Via Michael Lebowitz
Chama-se ‘Ataque de Pânico’.
Parece que esse é o primeiro trabalho do diretor, Fede Alvarez, e custou impressionantes 40 mil dólares.
Via Michael Lebowitz
Vou deixar pra vocês responderem: isso é ampliar os limites deixados pelo legado de Picasso ou uma heresia sem precedentes históricos? Digam ai.
Sei que esse é um post diferente do que se vê por aqui, mas aí já é demais. A AmBev lançou a cerveja Brahma no Peru utilizando o conceito da Skol no Brasil. É so conferir no vídeo e se perguntar: que mercado publicitário é esse? Passar bem.
Do generoso Skull,nu
Post foda do Ethan Zuckerman, que assistiu a palestra de David Weinberger e, generoso, escreveu um belo relato:
David starts with the provocative question, “How did we become the information age?” We’re moving out of that age and into a new one, one we haven’t named and don’t even understand yet. So we’re at a good point to reflect on this closing age and ask, “Why did information become the central metaphor?”
Despite the fact that we’ve reconsidered huge aspects of our culture in terms of information, we’re extremely bad at answering the question, “What is information?” Weinberger cites Ronald Day, who mentions that he’s discovered roughly 200 definitions of information. There’s a technical definition for the term, but that’s almost never what we mean.
Essa parte aí de baixo é muito foda, tem muito do conceito de filtro.
Information scales. Information allows corporations to grow to new sizes. But the secret of the information age is that information works by reducing the amount of information – you simplify individuals to the simple categories you decide are important. Information helped companies only because we made the decision to strip things down.
Uma contraposição foda!
Bits are about reducing distinctions to the simplest possible states – black or white, yes or no. They simplify. The web, by contrast, is a web of links. They agree, they amplify, they endorse, they denounce, they connect. Those links aren’t as simple as on and off – they build an enormously complex and intricate world, an abundance of rich, linguistic human intentions.
Nessa parte a parada começa a degringolar.
Descartes solved the mind-body problem, culminating a long tradition in western philosophy. He explains that we live in mental images, not just in the real world. It’s a lonely view of the world: each of us live by ourselves, in our own mental images of the world. In that space, communication has to be the act of communicating a worldview into another person’s heads. This is, “strictly speaking, a pathological, schizophrenic metaphysics.”
Não sabe quem é Samuel Bowles? Eu também não sabia, mas olha o que o Yochai Benkler acha do cara:
Yochai Benkler introduces Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute as his “intellectual hero” referencing his ability to apply a completely different set of intellectual tools to problems, switching tactics each decade.
Então, agora que voê já sabe que o cara é bolado, saiba que ele foi dar uma palestra e, para nossa sorte, o Ethan Zuckerman, outro maluco foda demais, estava na platéia e fez um relato da conversa.
The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.
As Smith speculated in “The Wealth of Nations”, the property rights revolution contributed to the wealth of states. It emphasized unambiguous ownership of land and resources. But now the most important resources – information and ideas – are difficult to own, risky to pursue, and wasteful if not shared. Strong property rights might not be the best strategy for allocating resources in this environment.
Information, suggests Kenneth Arrow, is a fugitive resource. There are contradictions between private property and information acquisition and retention.
O cara agora é um empresário. E dos bons. Duvida?
“Entertainment, really, is a dying industry,” says Kutcher. “We’re a balanced social-media studio, with revenue streams from multiple sources” — film, TV, and now digital. “For the brand stuff, we’re not replacing ad agencies but working with everyone to provide content and the monetization strategies to succeed on the Web.”
“If we in this industry don’t figure something out, we’re going to go the way of the music industry and be cannibalized by the Web,” says Kutcher. “It’s really a war to make money.”
“When I have a conversation with someone and they say, ‘I’m not worried about monetization yet,’ that scares the shit out of me”
“You cannibalize this business” — he waves at Hollywood — “a profit-positive business that trades at a decent multiple, and you’re just going to put people out of work. And these folks are counting on just figuring it out. And if they don’t, we’re fucked! That’s not okay.”
Sobre agências:
“For years, the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system that they’ve been monetizing off,” he says, referring to Nielsen ratings. “Now that the Web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric — now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”
“Katalyst is a merger of three industries,” he goes on, settling into an unexpectedly credible argument. “A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.”
Marc Andreessen, sujeito que entende do riscado, explica o sucesso da empresa de Kutcher:
“Katalyst is way out on the leading edge in terms of thinking this stuff through,” he says. Katalyst steps into the gap left by ad agencies that gave up on the Web after the dotcom bust. “Banner ads aren’t going to cut it,” he says. “And media companies have not been creative or aggressive about making products designed for engagement marketing. Now that’s changing, giving brand advertisers a new way and reason to buy.”
