Space shuttle Discovery gets a piggy-back-ride on a Boeing 747

NASA’s space shuttle Discovery is set to land in Washington, D.C. this April, where the now retired fleet leader — the world’s most flown spacecraft — will be welcomed by the Smithsonian Institution during a four-day public festival, museum officials said on Tuesday (Feb. 28).

Flying from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, Discovery is scheduled to touch down at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 17, weather permitting. It will then be offloaded by crane and towed to the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, two days later.

via Collect Space

The plane is called – Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

 

// Photos – NASA, Wikipedia

Say hello to OpenStreetMap – the Wikipedia of maps

In October 2011, Google finally revealed pricing for Google Maps services. Lightweight usage was still free…significant load volumes would begin to incur charges: basically, services and applications that generated more 25,000 map loads per day would be charged $10-$40 for every additional 1,000 map loads.

For businesses put off by the new costs of Google Maps, the main alternative seems to be OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a UK-based, volunteer-driven non-profit dedicated to creating and offering free geographic data to anyone who wants it.

OpenStreetMap (or OSM) boasts more than 400,000 registered volunteers who supply mapping data and updates to the project. It’s an oversimplification, but think of OSM as a loose equivalent to Wikipedia for mapping data: anyone can contribute, and the content is available to anyone.

Foursquare and Apple have already made the leap to OSM – learn more – Why Are Companies Defecting Google Maps?

 
 

“A free editable map of the whole world…made by people like you.”

“View, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.”

– OpenStreetMap.org

Change your world view – maps with the North Pole as the center

Imagine the world with its center at the North Pole.

Asia nearly touches North America, and Europe is a short Viking’s paddle from North America too.

Add in the Winter ice and all the land masses connect.

The view from space.

 

 

//Maps are from – Reading Teachers, Athropolis, and the National Science Foundation.

Today is International Women’s Day – celebrate and show your support

Today is International Women’s Day. Celebrate all the wonderful women in your life!

Also, take some time to help support an issue:

Women in the U.S. make 81 cents to the dollar men earn doing the same job. 

Nearly 50 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, on average women are still paid less than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs in the U.S. — that’s called the pay gap. It means that each time the average woman starts a new job, she’s likely to start from a lower base salary than her male counterparts.

Just as interest compounds, so does the pay gap. As a woman moves from job to job during her career, the pay gap between her and her male colleagues is likely to become wider and wider.

Personal financial advisors and legal occupations suffer the largest gender pay gaps. Personal and home care aides and special education teachers have the smallest pay gaps.

Unequal pay isn’t just unfair, it’s illegal. But unless men and women who have the same job discuss what they’re getting paid, unequal pay can go unaddressed indefinitely.

via Narrow the Gap

 

Learn more and join in:

 

Google Doodle for International Women's Day

Ice Cube on environmental architecture and gangster traffic in Los Angeles

Pacific Standard Time exhibitions featuring husband-and-wife design pioneers Charles and Ray Eames

LA Times photos of the famous Eames House and the Wikipedia profile.

London Olympics this summer, 2012 – every event will be livestreamed on web and mobile

NBC has partnered with YouTube to provide its video player and livestreaming infrastructure for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Part of its strategy is to broadcast every live event in some form, showing more than 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage…using (the YouTube) player to deliver livestreams on NBCOlympics.com.

“We’ll also include replays of Web-exclusive events, all television broadcasts, interviews with the athletes and exclusive daily segments about London 2012. Live streams will be available across our mobile platforms, providing an extraordinary 360-degree coverage of The Games.”

The rights are shared across the world, in the UK the BBC has gained access to The Games and will deliver live coverage via television broadcasts but also online via its website and iPlayer service.

via TNW

—

During the Beijing Games, NBC offered more than 2,200 hours of live video coverage – SBJSBD

 

The London Olympics begin July 27, 2012.

 

Trailer for Ridley Scott’s new movie, Prometheus – released as a TED Talk

TED Talk from the future – as envisioned by Prometheus director Ridley Scott

“If you will indulge me…I’d like to change the world.”

 

In the year 2023 Peter Weyland will make a speech in Tokyo about how humanity has become the new gods, with the power to create artificial life that looks like a human.  This viral marketing campaign is a smart choice by Fox, and as a fan of the Alien franchise, I could watch this over and over again.

Ridley Scott, director of “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” returns to the genre he helped define. With Prometheus, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. 

via ThinkHero

 

Learn more:

WeylandIndustries.com

Prometheus-Movie.com

The digital divide – newspapers are completely lost

Online advertising is booming. Already a $32 billion business, advertisers are expected to spend a full $62 billion online in 2016. But news publishers are not poised to cash in on the growth, a report released Monday by the Pew Research Center suggests.

The problem? News publishers’ online advertising products simply aren’t competitive. Most tend to depend on static, un-targeted banner advertisements, making their products less desirable than the highly targeted advertisements offered by the likes of Facebook and Google.

Among the other findings:

  • 21% of ads on an online news site are for the news organization’s own products.
  • By category, the financial industry is the largest spender in online news advertising (18%), followed by cosmetics and toiletries (5%).
  • Most ads are static banner ads. Rich media and video ads are rare.
  • Few legacy print customers are moving to digital

via Mashable

—

A detailed study that shows newspapers losing $7 from print for every digital $1, without even a sense of how they are addressing a key aspect of that transition. It’s an unfortunate vacuum.

One exec bluntly states, “There’s no doubt we’re going out of business right now.”

via paidContent

 

This unfortunate state of affairs is costing the newspapers $25 billion this year and success stories are rare. One success I was able to find comes the The Atlantic magazine, a much smaller company pulling in $18 million in advertising.

Scholastic joins the e-book revolution – new app for children’s books

The kids’ e-book market is still nascent, with e-books making up just about three percent of children’s book sales. That could change now that Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s book publishers, is digitizing much of its list and releasing an e-reading app, “Storia,” that includes a large e-bookstore and lets kids read e-books based on their reading level.

The app itself is free and comes with five free e-books. A store contains over 1,000 other children’s e-books—many available in digital format for the first time—that can be sorted by grade level, reading level, age and character/series.

Some of the titles — 151 in the store now—are “enriched e-books,” which “which use word games, story interactions, and animation to deeply draw your young reader in, further developing confidence and critical thinking skills.” Parents can also track their kids’ process through the books, and the app can store multiple virtual bookshelves for children in one family.

more details – paidContent

 

// Photo from Hastac