It looks like Amazon is becoming a video competitor to Apple's iTunes.

Coming Soon from Amazon: Unboxed Videos

It is one of the frustrations of being an academic researcher in a world that has grown highly commercial. Data is everywhere, but there is precious little of it for university researchers to work with. Raw data about people’s online behavior — the grist for many an academic researcher’s mill — remains locked up inside large companies, accessible only to a subset of corporate researchers.

The AOL incident has set off a flurry of divergent opinions in the academic community over the appropriateness of using the data for academic research.

Researchers Yearn to Use AOL Logs, but They Hesitate

Search the full text of books and discover new ones.

Google Book Search

What is Gapminder?

Gapminder is a non-profit venture that develops information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways. In short, it enables you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics. Our method is to turn boring data into enjoyable interactive animations using Flash technology. Gapminder is a Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development co-operation Agency, Sida. In collaboration with United Nations Statistic Division we promote free access to searchable public data and our animations of different types of data are freely available.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

SpiralFrog is a new online music destination, offering ad-supported legal downloads of audio and video content licensed from the catalogs of the world’s major and independent record labels.

SpiralFrog will be a secure environment where music lovers can satisfy their unyielding passion and thirst for music, entertainment, and information. Our site will be as multifaceted, smart, and current as the audience we hope to attract. An audience that we believe is the driving force behind the way music is created, discovered, and consumed today.

SPIRAL FROG [ a digital entertainment destination ]

Timothy Brown, CEO, IDEO

Not so long ago, Tim Brown recounts, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion.

At IDEO, a “design thinker” must not only be intensely collaborative, but “empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.” Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a “landscape of innovation” that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Brown dips into three central “buckets” in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively. While designing a new hospital, IDEO staff stretched out on a gurney to see what the emergency room experience felt like. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles,” says Brown, and realize the “most important thing is telling people what’s going on.” In a completely different venue, IDEO visited a NASCAR pit crew to come up with a more effective design for operating theaters.

After inspiration comes “building to think:” often a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process. Says Brown, “So many good ideas fail to make it out to market because they couldn’t navigate through the system.” IDEO counts on storytelling to develop and express its ideas, and to buy key players into the concept. Finally, IDEO relies on constantly refreshing its sources of inspiration by bringing in bold thinkers to campus, and increasingly, focusing on socially oriented design problems.

Innovation Through Design Thinking

Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year.

The UN says this is "very bad news." They also noted:

"This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium -- a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent."

President Hamid Karzai expressed disappointment at the results.

35 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product is estimated to come from the narcotics trade.

Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan

Today, women in mainstream films more often populate the margins as girlfriends, mothers and wives, often with stereotypical personalities.

In 2005, there was not a single female-driven drama that was a financial blockbuster.

One place actresses are still the dominant force is on the newsstand. Female stars may not sell tickets, but they do sell magazines. But this type of exposure may be making the possibility of serious leading roles only more remote.

In the grassy land that surrounds actress Vera Farmiga’s house in upstate New York sits a pile of ashes. “This is where I burn the scripts,” she said as she circled the scarred earth with her two pet goats. “I stack up all those crass female characters, all those utterly ordinary women, all those hundreds and hundreds of parts that have no substance or meaning and turn them into a blazing pyre.” She kicked some charred pages that had somehow escaped the flames. “It’s really cathartic,” she said. “It’s my revenge on Hollywood insensitivity and greed. The ashes go to the compost. At least the scripts can finally help the world in some way.”

All's well that ends well?

the breakthrough female performance of the year belongs to Penélope Cruz. When cast in Hollywood films, Cruz has been relegated to the role of the beauty. But in “Volver,” Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, he imagines her differently: Cruz is still sexy, but she’s also independent, maternal, mercurial, determined. “No one in Hollywood has ever asked me to be anything other than attractive,” Cruz told me at the Cannes Film Festival, where the women of “Volver” shared the Best Actress prize. “They have no idea what women can do. They don’t give them the chance.”

Check out Volver.

A Film of One's Own

Busily monitoring our well-known tendency to strident self-importance, earnest American practitioners of personal diplomacy can risk missing the genuinely humbling lesson of being abroad: an awareness of how bewildering another country’s own blend of boorishness and fervent belief, of openness and defiance, of backwardness and progress and of internal dissensions can be. In the end, it’s as narcissistic to assume we’re the overbearing cause of everybody else’s national identity crises in a dizzying world as it is to imagine that we can orchestrate the solutions to them. The sobering, and liberating, truth is that our britches are not that big.

The I’m-Not-Ugly American

MyStrands’ mission is to understand musical taste in order to help people discover new music and get greater enjoyment out of the music they already love.

MyStrands helps us discover new music that we might never think of on our own, such as linking one artist in a genre to another, somebody famous to someone less so but equally deserving. By interconnecting listeners around the world, we build lists that connect us to one another. And in so doing, we not only expand our musical horizons but obtain greater enjoyment from the music we already love.

For all the times you've wanted to control the music at the rave, wait no more.

MyStrands