11 documentaries about cities – streaming on Netflix

Here are 11 new and new-ish documentaries now streaming that offer interesting, frustrating and downright sad stories about cities.

 

Bill Cunningham New York
2010, 84 minutes
Directed by Richard Press

A film about octogenarian and New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who rides his bike around New York City taking pictures of clothes and the people – both ordinary and extraordinary – who wear them. A unique look at the changing fashions of one of the world’s centers of culture.

 

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White House creates – U.S. Ignite program – to make internet 90% cheaper and start building gigabit networks

The President is set to sign an executive order today (June 13, 2012) that aims to cut the cost of broadband construction across federal roadways and properties by up to 90 percent. The White House is also is looking to improve “next-generation applications and (the) digital experience,” running on networks that are a heady 100 times faster than what’s in use today.

Called – U.S. Ignite – the partnership aims to push the growth of next-generation broadband networks, teaming up with over 100 start-ups, universities and existing tech companies like HP, Comcast and Verizon for the project.

The National Science Foundation has thrown in $250 million to assist the partnership’s creation of a national 1-gigabit network that would connect together academic and developer hubs.

Mozilla has decided to team up with the foundation to offer up a $500,000 prize pot for developers looking to help create the “internet of the future”.

via Engadget

 

Follow the U.S. Ignite program on: Facebook – Twitter

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Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra performs in the Metro as a flash mob

In April 2012 Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra (Sjællands Symfoniorkester) surprised the passengers in the Copenhagen Metro by playing Griegs Peer Gynt. The flash mob was created in collaboration with Radio Klassisk. All music was performed and recorded in the metro.

Visit our website: Copenhagen Phil – Facebook

Produced by – Makropol

The sound: The Copenhagen Metro is very quiet and the recording you hear is where the train is standing still. That’s why the recording you hear is so clean and crisp – and the sound is actually surprisingly good in the Copenhagen metro. We did this deliberately because we feel that a good sound experience is vital when trying to portray the actual experience that day. Further to the main recording, when the train was standing still, the recordings from the cameras was, as far as possible, mixed into the sound.

Quote from the sound technician: I recorded the sound with XY Oktava MK-012 supercardioid microphones close to the soloists and a set of DPA 4060 omnidirectional microphones as overhead for the rest of the orchestra. For some of the close up shots, the camera mikes (Sennheiser ME 66) was added.

 

// Thx – Zaid El-Hoiydi

Nate Silver predicts our next President – by keeping a running forecast

If you haven’t heard of Nate Silver then you are in for a ride. Nate is very, very famous in two distinct areas, baseball and politics, for his ability to predict things.

For baseball he developed, PECOTA, a system for predicting future performance of baseball players, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus in 2003.

From there he moved into politics and went on a run, correctly predicting the winner in 49 out of 50 states for the 2008 presidential election, and all 35 of the Senate races.

That made him some enemies, specifically all those existing pollsters who were proved wrong time and time again.

They still don’t like him, but he is the reigning king of political predictions and now a blogger for the New York Times. Where he maintains a running forecast for the 2012 presidential election.

This screenshot shows the forecasted winner in November:

 

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Facebook creates a special page for the London 2012 Olympic Games

Facebook has created a special page pulling together all the hundreds of athletes, teams, and sports covering the London 2012 Olympic Games.

While the sports and teams are information hubs, the athletes pages are amazing pieces of self-promotion. Many of them are soon-to-be icons in America, like Michael Phelps, and getting several thousands ‘likes’ can’t hurt.

 

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Dr. Seuss – before his children’s books, he drew great ads

Before we knew him as Dr. Seuss, he was Theodore Seuss Geisel, adman. As early as 1927 he was illustrating ads for Ford, GE and NBC campaigns. His illustrative style was the same, even then.

– Via JESS3

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California begins offering $1 trips on Greyhound from LA to SF

Profiled by a Los Angeles Times travel writer, it reminds me of the $1 DC to NYC bus ride.

One traveler finds the ghost of Jack Kerouac and more on a bus trip up California’s spine. At $1 each way, it has to be the best bargain in all of travel.

Mindful that great American road trips occur in all sorts of vessels — heck, Huck rode a rickety raft — we’re on a Greyhound bus heading up California’s flat, slender belly.

“Why?” you ask.

That’s a sensible question, but let us open our hearts and heads to this for a few seconds:

By the time we’re done, we’ll meet a vagabond grandma and a former prostitute, an impish computer genius and just maybe the ghost of Jack Kerouac, who looked at Greyhound and California’s wide-open roads as gateways to the finest American right of all: the right to wander.

So, climb aboard. No security checkpoints, no luggage fees. No pillows or drink service either, but also no charge. A few of my fellow passengers, some more hollow-eyed than even I, have prison on their faces. A few are students, but most look like the same sorts you see on commercial airlines these days.

The full story – Greyhound Express: new spin on an old-fashioned ride

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Our brains can brake a car faster than our feet

If you’ve ever had to slam on the brakes to prevent an accident, you know that the time it takes to get your foot to that pedal can seem like an eternity. Now, German researchers aim to cut that reaction time by getting drivers’ brain waves to help stop the car. Their findings appear in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

When you’re behind the wheel, or doing anything physical, your brain knows what it wants you to do before your body swings into action. Most times, this minor delay between thinking and doing is no big deal. But when you’re moving at 60 miles an hour and the car in front of you stops short, every fraction of a second counts.

Researchers recorded how quickly volunteers reacted when the lead vehicle in a driving simulator suddenly hit the brakes. Sensors monitored the subjects’ brain activity. Turns out drivers knew they needed to slow down more than a tenth of a second before they tap the brakes.

That might not seem like much, but if cars could read minds, they could stop 12 feet sooner at highway speeds. Which could mean the difference between a scare and a smash.

Listen to the podcast version of this story – Brain Brakes Car Faster Than Foot

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Jimmy Fallon’s Saturday Night Live audition

“I’m going to do some celebrity impressions.” Talk about your low-key, understated introductions! That’s how Jimmy Fallon’s 1998 audition for “Saturday Night Live” kicked off, with a statement that doesn’t even come close to describing the following eight minutes of Fallon hilariously hitting the nail on the head again and again.

Back in 1998, Fallon was just another rising comic, but the future “Late Night” host and Slow Jammer clearly knew his craft and his strengths. He started off with a “celebrity walk-a-thon” with John Travolta, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, then segued into original characters like “Double Take Guy” and “Wannabe Composer.”

via The Clicker