What if Google were a UNIX shell…
Well, it’d be like this: www.goosh.org.
Once again, it’s the simple things…
Tags: Google, On the Web, Programming, UI, User InterfacePosts Tagged with On the Web
This game will help end world hunger. Literally.
Keeping it simple can make a difference, and Poverty.com’s sister site FreeRice is a perfect example. FreeRice has two goals:
- Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
- Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
Execution against these goals resulted in a very casual online word game which, for each correctly answered multiple-choice question, contributes 10 grains of rice to end world hunger.
In a quick session (that actually became somewhat of a contest with my wife) we contributed several hundred grains. It doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up—between October 7th (when the program launched) and yesterday (November 20th) over 3 billion world-hunger-ending grains of rice have been racked up. Yesterday alone FreeRice donated over 218 million grains.
Wondering who is paying for all this? There are small advertisements placed on the FreeRice site. The money generated by the advertisements buys the rice. Thankfully the ads are placed on the site in a restrained manner. A ClickZ blog posting notes that Apple, American Express, Toshiba and Macy’s are among the participating advertisers.
The game itself (while incredibly simple) is fun, has an addictive quality, and provides an assessment of your progress by way of 50 game ‘levels.’ The game was designed with everyone in mind:
FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.
There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.
Ready to test your vocabulary? Go help end world hunger! Report back with what level you made it to!
On the Web: Mark Luthringer: Ridgemont Typologies
I came across Mark Luthringer’s project Ridgemont Typologies several weeks ago and put a note out to Mark hoping he’d allow me to post a few images along with a link back to his site. Mark obliged, but the post never saw daylight.
Fast forward to today. While running through some email from that time period I came across Mark’s response and wanted to post an excerpt from his artist statement (as opposed to trying to embellish upon or pull from it) and provide a link to his work:
The typological array’s inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption. Part of my intent with this work is to answer the question implied by the title of Robert Adams’s book What We Bought: If there is some kind of big sellout occuring, what are we getting in the deal?
The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.
To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though. In print, they confront us in a way never possible when they’re just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately.
I’m glad I came across that email. View the work: Mark Luthringer - Ridgemont Typologies
Tags: Art, On the Web, Photography, Visual DesignOn the Web: The Great Firewall of China
The Chinese government doesn’t want you to see this blog. Or, The Great Firewall of China web site is experiencing technical difficulties, which is the other reason an inquiry on a URL might report back that it is being censored in China.
Excerpts from the Great Firewall of China site:
Tags: Censorship, China, On the Web, Privacy, Web Applications[The aim] of this website is to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored. Help to keep the censorship transparent. Each blocked website will automatically be added to the great firewall on the homepage.
How it works
We’ve opened a website in China and route your url request on greatfirewallofchina.org through to our server in China. The server in China opens the url and the result is send back. Our testing is only based on one server on one location in China. We have different backup servers in different locations in China might one go down.
Other locations and other servers may give you different access to the various websites.
On a Mac: Apple posts have a new home
The popularity of my posts regarding the Mac, Apple, Parallels Desktop and the iPhone kept me blogging on those topics. That chatter has in turn been diluting the conversation that should be taking place here.
So, I’ve carved out another space on this big series of tubes, and this time it is just for those Apple topics. Please visit On a Mac for a continuation of the conversations which started here as well as new Apple-related content altogether.
Tags: Apple, Apple II, Apple Lisa, Apple Support, Apple TV, Applications, Hardware, iLife, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Lisa Office System, MacBook Pro, Macintosh, On the Web, os x, OS X Disk Utility, Parallels Coherence, Parallels Desktop