A woman reported "trampled" last Friday by Wal-Mart shoppers desperate for $29.87 DVD players has a long history of claiming injuries from Wal-Marts and other businesses where she worked or shopped.

Total Information Awareness would have detected this fraud immediately.

'Trampled' Wal-Mart Shopper Has History Of Injury Claims

... the much-ballyhooed "orbital space plane" ... [is] the wrong sort of craft ... [and NASA has] shut the door on some of the most innovative current thinking on space technology.

Buzz Aldrin weighs in on the future of NASA.

Fly Me to L 1

The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study in 2000. It found:

Low-income families (less than $30,000 annual income) are less likely to have computers, Internet access or newspaper subscriptions. However, they are equally likely to have a video-game player and their children are more likely to have TV sets in their bedrooms.

Family income is an inverse indicator of media use -- children from high-income families spend the least amount of time with media and children from low-income families spend the most time with media.

Kids are plugged in, parents have tuned out, studies show

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, ethnicity and income level are indicators of video game playing, particularly among older kids ages 8-18: African American and Hispanic youth play more video games than White youth, and kids from low and middle income communities spend more time playing video games than kids from high income areas.

Children and Video Games

There is a connection between the idea of place and the reality of cellular telephones. It is not encouraging.

Disconnected Urbanism

From the 19 November 2003 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

In China, "you have 20 million people a year moving from the countryside to the city, which requires building a city the size of Philadelphia every month," says Mark Tinker, global head of debt and equity strategy at stockbrokers Execution Ltd in London.

In the first episode, there's the predictable pile-up of "Sex and the City" meets "Hee-Haw" jokes. (Hilton wonders if Wal-Mart is where you go to buy "wall stuff.") But it's when Nicole muses about dragging the farm family's fresh-faced 19-year-old son into a sexual "threesome" for sport that you may find yourself reaching for a Louis Auchincloss novel and a bottle of Scotch.

I find this an interesting, and entirely believable, tidbit, to be included in a New York Times article only one day after its editorial page wrote about "The Wal-Martization of America."

The Season of the Heirheads

I even saw a man in a business suit digging chopsticks into a lo mein combination platter while navigating the crowd on Broadway.

Musings on mastering the modern multi-tasking of meals on the move.

The City Life: Can You Walk and Chew Pizza?

This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information contained in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows.

An accompanying tidbit from Ross Mayfield, to the theme of the recent Jim Gray interview with ACM Queue, blogged here: Netflix ships 1,500 terabytes worth of information a day. Andrew Odlyzko suggests that daily traffic flow on the Net is 2,000 terabytes.

How Much Information?

Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, Cities Transformed explores the implications ...

Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications