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Advertising: Movies, TVs and Magazines Work Together in Web Campaign

As major marketers shift more of their advertising spending to the Web, media companies like Hearst Magazines are scrambling to keep up.

New York Times

Culture Institutions Go After the Short-Attention-Span Crowd

Around 3,000 people, seemingly all in their 20s and 30s, attended the first Takeover at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

New York Times

Robot cars race around California

A $2m race for robotic vehicles in the Californian desert offers a glimpse at a driverless future for cars.

BBC

The New Nostradamus

Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

Good Magazine

MIT developing carbon-free, stackable rental cars

Sure, we know you love actually owning a car, but let's be honest -- in large cities with condensed layouts, your H3 doesn't make a lot of sense.

A group of researchers at MIT have been hard at work developing a solution that's kind on the planet and your scrawny legs. A team called Smart Cities have designed a small, two-seat, electric vehicle -- which they call the City Car -- that can be "stacked" in convenient locations (say, just outside a subway stop), and then taken on short trips around urban areas. The cars -- which are based around an omnidirectional "robot wheel" that encases an electric motor, suspension, and steering -- can be "folded" and attached to a group of other cars for charging.

The lineups of rentable vehicles would be accessible from various points around a city, with six or eight cars occupying just a single "regular" car space. Of course, you'll have to forgo your 24-inch rims... but that's life.

Engadget

World Premiere of Sufjan Stevens' "BQE" [Brooklyn, NY; 11/01/07]

Nostalgia for modernism + urban planning + indie rock + Brooklyn reference + orchestra = Sufjan Stevens' "The BQE"

Constructed between 1937-1964 as part of infamous city planner Robert Moses's master vision for New York City's social reality, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rose as 11.6 miles of neighborhood-severing, money-eating, limited-access overhead highway grimness. The book about Moses's modernist cruelty and obsession with cars over human needs is called The Power Broker, a relentless, detailed portrait of one man's egomania in urban planning.

Which is part of the reason why, when Sufjan Stevens said he had written a symphony about the BQE, people got so excited. Maybe Stevens would, through the power of art, convey this bleak inter-borough piece of citywide dismay as something majestic, the way he had transformed Detroit or Decatur.

Known for his chamber-pop miniatures about humble white working-poor life, Stevens has become indie's populist orchestrator. But he's also enough of a fool to try his hand at large-scale composition, having boasted of writing 50 albums extolling the dignity of local culture. Fans who celebrate his outsider ("indie") ambitions to excel in academic forms clap for his being at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival regardless. Given classical's lust for young flesh and filled seats, the crossover of Stevens's rapt fan base into three nights of sold-out crowds already deems the event a success.

Pitchfork