Incredible short film created for Coca Cola’s Burn energy drink by Publicis Mojo and Exit Films.
Tamu Townsend, a 37-year-old technical writer in Montreal, said she regularly received [Facebook] prompts to connect with acquaintances and friends who had died. “Sometimes it’s quite comforting when their faces show up,” Ms. Townsend said. “But at some point it doesn’t become comforting to see that. The service is telling you to reconnect with someone you can’t. If it’s someone that has passed away recently enough, it smarts.
As Older Users Join Facebook, Network Grapples With Death - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)
reblogged from rickwebb
The American dream itself — a house, a job, a car, a family, a little lawn for the kids to frolic on — has expanded into something far broader and less attainable than ever. Crafty insta-celebrities and self-branding geniuses and social media gurus assert that submitting to the daily grind to pay the mortgage constitutes a meager existence. Books like “The 4-Hour Work Week” tell us that working the same job for years is for suckers. We should be paid handsomely for our creative talents, we should have the freedom to travel and live wherever we like, our children should be exposed to the wonders of the globe at an early age.
Somehow “Mad Men” captures this ultra-mediated, postmodern moment, underscoring the disconnect between the American dream and reality by distilling our deep-seated frustrations as a nation into painfully palpable vignettes. Even as the former denizens of Sterling Cooper unearth a groundswell of discontent beneath the skin-deep promises of adulthood, they keep struggling to concoct chirpy advertising messages that provide a creepily fantastical backdrop to this modern tragedy.
“Mad Men”: Stillbirth of the American dream - Mad Men - Salon.com (via fluffynotes)
reblogged from fluffynotes
coketalk:
It takes a special kind of narcissism to celebrate ignorance by comparing one’s self to genius.
Having accepted the premise that ‘everything is media’, there is a corollary rule that goes with it at CP+B: ‘everything is branding’. The old way of thinking was that a person’s impressions of a brand could be formed and shaped by advertising alone, but that view has given way to a new, more holistic one, recognising that there are countless opportunities for contact between a brand and a consumer. Each one of these ‘touch-points’ - which can occur on the street, in the store, on the phone with a sales rep, in a bar talking to other people, on the Web, or wherever - all contribute to shaping the impressions and attitudes someone has about a brand. They are all connected to one another (or should be) because they are all part of the same unending story of a brand.
Hoopla, by Warren Berger and the CP+B crowd
PacMan in candles - awesome stop motion animation (via @brainpicker)
The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.
Clay Shirky’s interview in The Guardian, ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’
Von Clausewitz summed up what it had all been about in his classic On War. Men could not reduce strategy to a formula. Detailed planning necessarily failed, due to the inevitable frictions encountered: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of the opposition. Instead, the human elements were paramount: leadership, morale, and the almost instinctive savvy of the best generals. The Prussian general staff, under the elder von Moltke, perfected these concepts in practice. They did not expect a plan of operations to survive beyond the first contact with the enemy. They set only the broadest of objectives and emphasised seizing unforeseen opportunities as they arose. Strategy was not a lengthy action plan. It was the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.
Definitely the best passage from Jack Welch’s mediocre autobiography, Straight from the gut, p.448.
Loving Lissie’s cover of Kid Cudi’s ‘Pursuit of Happiness’
For retail [investors] to survive in this emerging environment, I think they will have to be long-term passive investors who are basically index players because any market inefficiencies will be small, transient and exploited by those with huge economies of scale. The notion that a single retail investor can somehow bet the market in a short-time play by exploiting an arbitrage now seems impossible.
Martin Fahy, CEO of the Financial Services Institute of Australiasia, in ‘Lost in the dark pools of competition’, Weekend AFR, July 3-4, 2010
Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.
From this wonderful New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten (via the brilliant @STWnext)
newyorker:
NEW VIDEO: Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks with James Surowiecki about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the future of the economy.
Read James Surowiecki’s piece from this week’s issue on the regulation crisis.
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
‘The Velluvial Matrix’ by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker
