Festo AirJelly

By alex | Published: 5/12/2008

You know how to get my attention:

encephalopod robot dirigibles

Those three keywords are enough to get me excited. But who wouldn’t get excited by this:

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The fairest of them all

By alex | Published: 5/9/2008

Look at the images to the right and pick the one you find most attractive.

I know, they are all dashing. But many psychological studies have suggested that we find faces with more symmetry (as well as faces closer to the “average” face) to be more attractive. Also, it seems more attractive people get higher student ratings. And men with symmetrical faces produce more orgasms in their female partners. All to say: it’s good to be symmetrical.

The above images are a 5 minute hack job, and I suspect that the uncanny symmetry (particularly lighting effects) leads two of these images to be creepier than the third…

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New York and Formal Infrastructure

By alex | Published: 5/8/2008

New York is a great place to live, in large part because of the informal infrastructure: the texture of neighborhoods that deftly interweaves the past, the present, and the future; the “texture,” for want of a better word, that New Yorkers seem to love, and visitors often dismiss as “grime” or urban decay. Call it “GTA IV chic.”

On the other hand, there are times when I return home from another city, and really wish that some of that texture could be ironed out. I’ve already noted that I am vexed by New Yorkers’ love of the subway–we use public transportation more than any other city in the US, and yet, almost every other subway system I’ve ridden on is cleaner and has more frequent trains. Yes, watching the rats frolic provides some level of entertainment, and who doesn’t want to pick up bedbugs from the benches, but I’ll take the modern subways of Singapore or Barcelona any day. And it’s not just a matter of age, as the subway system in metropolitan Tokyo shows, by being old, yet clean and on-time. And hey, how about a high-speed train for the Atlanta-Boston Corridor? Acela doesn’t cut it.

It’s not surprising–though it is embarrassing–that John Gapper uses the trip between JFK and Manhattan as an example of just how bad the US’s infrastructure has become:

If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

And New York City should be at the cusp of this kinds of development. Sure, we send an unfair share of our taxes to upstate communities–a practice that should be curtailed–but that is a symptom, not a cause; a symptom of lack of political will. New York seems too concerned with creating and then battling crises to ever move beyond this. The failure of the congestion pricing plan is a great example of this. Yes, it was imperfect, but then what in this city isn’t?

That historical texture–“this is the way we’ve always done it”–is our bane. It doesn’t mean we do everything wrong. I heard a report from someone visiting from Philadelphia who was awed by the military precision of trash collection and snow removal. The increase in public safety over the last decade has been just short of miraculous. Nonetheless, if New York wants to remain a Global City, it can’t rest on its laurels… or on its history. Historical inertia only gets you so far.

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Kudos to (ex) Chronicle Staff!

By alex | Published: 5/4/2008

The administration at Quinnipiac, uncomfortable with some of the stories reported by their students in the campus newspaper, has taken a series of steps to gain closer control over the content of the paper. They have clearly indicated that they want student media to be independent of the university, but what this really means is unclear. In the nearer term, they established a task force with no faculty or student membership to set out a path for student media. Their plan, as it was recently articulated, was that the administration should hand-pick students to run the paper, putting a business student in the role of “publisher,” with control over editorial content.

The readers of this blog generally come from the fields of journalism or communication, and don’t need to be told just how stupid this looks to the outside world. Unfortunately, there remain those in the administration at Quinnipiac who not only refuse to acknowledge how much damage this incident has done to the reputation of the institution, they refuse to listen to their own faculty’s expert guidance on the matter. This week, the Faculty Senate voted unanimously that the administration should suspend any planned changes until a more appropriate plan could be assembled. The president responded with a letter decrying not the vote so much as the fact that it was made public. That the senate operates publicly seems to be lost on our president, who while otherwise very effective, has nonetheless put himself on the wrong side of an important issue, and decided to dig his heals in rather than work with Quinnipiac’s faculty and students to come up with a workable solution.

It is perhaps ironic that the best source of information on the issue has consistently been the Yale Daily News. In a recent article, they note that a large number of Chronicle staff have deserted the newspaper, and plan to strike forth with their own online newspaper. It’s a shame to see the Chronicle go. The credibility of our journalism program has already taken a hit, and continues to get bludgeoned by the tone-deaf policies of our administration. I only hope that the students make a good run of their venture, and that it serves them and our community well. I don’t know the students involved, but I publicly volunteer to assist them in any way I can be of help.

Now the question becomes whether the administration will move on to strangle our television and radio stations, as well. If we keep telling our best and brightest students that we don’t want them working under a Quinnipiac masthead, I suspect growing numbers of them will take the hint, and choose universities with real communities that nurture their students and involve them in decision-making.

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