18 May 2005
Desert campaign to save humanity [BBC]
The Dalai Lama and a host of Nobel prize winners have joined actor Richard Gere for a conference aimed at righting the wrongs of modern humanity.
16 May 2005
A creativity lab for Taiwan [Business Week]
The Industrial Technology Research Institute thinks it has a way to turn the country into an innovator, rather than just an improver.
16 May 2005
Multimedia phones [Business Week]
Consumer-electronics giants are using their music, TV and game savvy to build hot new models.
In 2003, roughly 500 Chinese workers arrived in Dortmund to deal the final blow to the city’s former status as a heavy-industry heartland in Germany’s Ruhr River valley. Working by day and sometimes by night, the Chinese dismantled Dortmund’s last blast furnace, which the steelmaking giant ThyssenKrupp had mothballed in 1998, no longer able to run it at a profit.
Samsung’s new phone for Sprint can take two-megapixel photos, scan in business cards, record 90-minute videos, play TV shows and even transcribe dictated speech. But how well?
12 May 2005
Hiring is obsolete
Interesting essay by Paul Graham on why setting up a company is now better than getting a job in a big company.
4 May 2005
MoMA’s minimalist baroque [Praxis]
Yoshio Taniguchi’s project for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art is the fifth major reorganisation of the institution in its 75-year history. It embodies both a departure in scale and an organisational and stylistic reinvention that will surely set the character of the museum for the next generation.
Stephen Rustow, the chief architect on the project (and a close friend), reflects on a formalism that whispers loudly.
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Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, has a gargantuan task. He wants to make this formerly divided metropolis one of Europe’s most attractive places to live. But Berlin is bankrupt.