After 45 years of motorway lining the Seine, Paris is starting to re-pedestrianize the riverside. They’ve been doing it for short periods during the summers with the Paris Plages, but now the plan is to make it permanent. It’s an irresistible destination (all the more so without the motorway), being made inconvenient for or inaccessible to cars. This is, I think, a winning strategy.
Tag: paris
Shared Links for Feb 12th
- Astronaut's Video Satirizes NASA Bureaucracy – I'm impressed that NASA actually let this satire out, and forced a bunch of managers to watch it… not sure if they're actually capable of fixing themselves though. We can hope. (tagged: nasa bureaucracy youtube satire astronaut npr )
- Sexting Teens May Face Child Porn Charges – Can it really be kiddie porn if you took the photo yourself, and you're a (horny) minor? Seriously. This country is totally nuts. Maybe we should ban mirrors in teen bedrooms too. (tagged: sex technology porn sexting texting sms mms phone )
- H.R. 801 That Conyers bill again! – A roundup of responses to John Conyers' H.R. 801: "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", which would (despite it's ridiculous name) prevent the public from accessing the fruits of the research which they funded in the first place. We should be expanding NIH style open access requirements, not rolling them back (tagged: hr801 conyers PLoS open access copyright publishing science policy )
- Congress is trying to restrict public access to publicly funded research – Under pressure from publishers, Congress is considering outlawing open access requirements like the ones that NIH imposes on its grantees, meaning that the fruits of publicly funded research will not be publicly available. We should be expanding open access requirements across all public research funding agencies, not rolling back what little we've got. Write your rep! (tagged: copyright PLoS publishing open access NIH PubMed HR801 research science policy )
- Reports of Vélib’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated – How can one really ensure that public-private "partnerships" like the Velib program don't end up being subject to this kind of PR BS? Or alternatively, how can one ensure that such a program is efficiently and effectively administered purely by the public sector? (tagged: bicycle velib transportation pr cycling paris )
Shared Links for Sat, Feb 7th, 2009 through Tue, Feb 10th, 2009
- Thefts puncture Paris bike scheme – More of Paris' Velib bicycles are being stolen or vandalized than expected. Not sure what their expectations were, but it is pretty annoying for basically every bike in the network to have been either stolen or damaged in only 18 months. The vandalism is probably impossible to stop (since it can be carried out while the bikes are locked in their stands) but the theft should be preventable with secure stands, and aggressive enforcement of responsibility for a bike while you've got it checked out (i.e. if the bike doesn't come back, your credit card is immediately charged for the total value of the bike, or possibly even more). I also can't help but wonder if the same functionality could be implemented with much, much cheaper bikes, especially in a city as flat as Paris. Singlespeeds with fenders and a basket, maybe 100 Euros each? With an RFID tag embedded – and put all the smarts in the racks. (tagged: bicycle bike cycling transportation paris velib )
- Google Power to the People – Google developing tools to allow you to disentangle your own energy use, when the datastreams from smart meters come on line. Making this information easy to comprehend, pricing electricity to displace demand from the peak times, and allowing the largest energy users to schedule their use in an automated way could (without even changing anything physically) have a large impact on the amount of power generating capacity we (don't) need. (tagged: energy google sustainability green open data transparency )
- WattzOn and Wesabe Join Forces – This is the post that made me wish the Elevations Credit Union was more internet savvy. I want to be able to apply all these big-brotherly tools to myself! (tagged: open data transparency energy wesabe wattzon money finance )
- Numbrary – A library for numbers – mass quantities of publicly available data, mostly (entirely?) from the US Government. In a hopefully usable and searchable form. Many automatically generated charts and tables. (tagged: data transparency government statistics open )
- Mayapedal – People building useful human-powered bicimaquinas, in Guatemala, where human labor is still a common prime mover: washing machines, coffee de-pulpers, corn de-grainers, grain mills, blenders, concrete microvibrators, etc. One kind of appropriate technology. There's also some YouTube videos on them, e.g.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqbtUKpSjo (tagged: bicycle guatemala appropriate technology human power energy )
- Humanity In Motion – An incredible montage of what bicycles can be: safe, enjoyable, cheap, convenient, everyday transportation for young people and for old, for families, in a city largely unpolluted by the exhaust and noise of cars. (tagged: bicycle transportation amsterdam netherlands photos )