You Don't Want to Know (via Super Punch)
For decades it’s been hidden behind billboards or wrapped in a giant faux shopping bag. Many shoppers never even notice it.
But old photos reveal a five-story building (right, in 1906), sticking out like a sore thumb in front of the world’s most iconic department store.
Although Macy’s leases ad space on it, the five-story building has never been owned by the store and is one of the most famous “holdouts†in New York real estate history.
It all started around 1900, when Macy’s, then located on West 14th Street, began picking up land in Herald Square for its huge new shopping mecca.
Macy’s had a verbal agreement to buy a plot at the corner of 34th and Broadway. But an agent acting on behalf of rival department store Siegel-Cooper scored the plot instead.
Reportedly the agent wanted Macy’s to give Siegel-Cooper its 14th Street store in exchange for the land at 34th Street.
But Macy’s wouldn’t have it. The store was built around the plot.
In 1903, Siegel-Cooper put up the five-story building there today.
[Above, how Macy's covered up the building in 1936 and in the 1960s]
The following blog post was published as a guest blog post on Forbes.com. I wrote it after Al Jazeera successfully moved some of their Drupal sites from their traditional hosting company to Acquia Hosting (now called Acquia Managed Cloud) to help them survive a 2,000% traffic increase as a result of the crises in the Middle East. The blog post provides real proof of how the Cloud helped one of the largest news organizations in the world survive one of the largest political events in the world. A fascinating story for Drupal!
Over the past decade, the Web has completely transformed how people create and consume information. We have all witnessed firsthand how the free flow of information is impacting the way individuals and companies communicate and how the rules of governance are changing for entire nations. Now, we’re all participating and reporting on events as they happen, and from where they happen.
There is no better example of that than the most recent events in the Middle East. And one organization, Al Jazeera, the world’s largest news organization solely focused on the Middle East, was right in the middle of the incredible broadcast and social media storm that instantly developed. Throughout the ordeal, Al Jazeera effectively leveraged the power of the cloud to stay on the air and scale its reach and performance. If events of the past few months are any indication, there are lessons here for other content-driven companies to consider for their own online operations.
Al Jazeera’s English operations broadcasts news and current affairs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with more than 1,000 staff members from more than 50 nations. Quite literally, Al Jazeera provides the world with a front seat on the Middle East stage. It broadcasts from centers in Doha, the capital city of the state of Qatar, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington.
Al Jazeera’s live blog site is powered by Drupal, a free, open source social publishing platform that enables content-driven organizations to publish content and build communities quickly and easily. Drupal is used by many of the world’s most prominent organizations including the White House, the World Economic Forum, Intel, The Economist and Turner Broadcasting.
Al Jazeera’s English live blog site was a vital source for breaking news in Egypt. Bloggers were posting updates from the epicenter of the crisis and social media was often the only means of communication both inside and outside of the country. During the crisis, traffic to the Al Jazeera web site increased 1,000% and traffic to the live blog spiked 2,000%. This dilemma, normally a good one for news organizations, caused unpredictable performance and excessive page load times for site visitors.
From an infrastructure standpoint, Al Jazeera had historically hosted its blog with a traditional provider but had increasingly suffered a variety of scalability issues brought on by surging demand – unacceptable for Al Jazeera or any similar content business. What might have been just a typical technical nuisance on a mundane news day quickly became unsustainable when Egypt erupted.
Al Jazeera faced a mission-critical problem that needed a real-time solution. Where could it find performance hosting and support immediately and within a reasonable cost? Would it be secure and private? What about reliable? The answer: The cloud, the various data access, storage and hosting services available remotely over the Internet. Much discussed but often not fully appreciated by the business community, cloud services enable custom sites to perform well under varying, and sometimes severe, traffic conditions. Moving to a Drupal-supported cloud option allowed Al Jazeera to scale up quickly, dynamically render their content faster, and achieve a higher level of site reliability – issues that previously overwhelmed its physical hardware environments.
By leveraging Drupal and turning to the cloud, the Al Jazeera technical team demonstrated how to rapidly turn a seemingly disastrous situation into a net positive business decision going forward. Fast forward a few weeks, and the demands on Al Jazeera’s Web infrastructure have only increased with new crises across the region. The difference is the organization is now able to better handle these unforeseen demands and focus on the core business, reporting the news as it happens.
If you thought Jonathan Safran Foer liked to cut up books, then prepare to be delighted by the work of Chicago-based artist Brian Dettmer, who crafts old encyclopedias, medical journals, and dictionaries into completely original sculptures. But according to Dettmer's website, he only manipulates the books, never adding new elements.
I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each layer while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose alternate histories and memories. My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.
More photos of Dettmer's work after the jump.
Kind of a classic little trick for ya'll today. You know the <style> blocks you can put in the <head> of your HTML to do styling? You don't actually have to put those in your head, they can be anywhere on the page. It's not valid (or good practice) but it works.
What's more? It's just an element like any other. The default stylesheet of all browers makes it display: none;.
If you move it down into the body and reset it to display: block; you can see the very code which is applying style to that page. Might as well make it look nice and code-y to eh?
body style {
display: block;
background: #333;
color: white;
font: 13px/1.8 Monaco, Mono-Space;
padding: 20px;
white-space: pre;
}What's more? You can give it the HTML5 attribute of contenteditable and you can literally edit the CSS right there and watch it effect the page.
<style contenteditable>body {
background: green;
}</style>
That's how all the code on The Shapes of CSS page is done. Not only is it just kinda neat, but it's very useful on a page like that so you don't have to maintain the CSS in two places.
Ogilvy has released an infographic detailing the major social media players and their Chinese counter parts. Although the infographic was first published six months back, the rise of services like Groupon and Quora in the west and Tencent in China rendered the previous infographic some what irrelevant.
According to the new infographic, the online trade segment is competed by eBay, Taobao and 360 buy. In the social networking segment LinkedIn is pitted against Welink and Uchi.cn, and Facebook against Renren and Douban. Twitter is competing with Sohu and QQ in the microblogging category, with Youtube facing competition from Youku.com in online video sharing. The online music sharing is being battled out by Spotify and Xiami and Top100.cn. Foursquare is competing with Jiepand and Kai in the location based services segment and Groupon is facing competitors like Manzuo and Meituan in the daily deals sector.
All in all the infographic does a pretty good job of showing the fact that every Social Media segment is being fiercely contested by local and global players in China.
Note: You can click on the infographic to enlarge it.
Ordinary microscopes can see 8 times more minutely than known physical limits if miniature glass spheres are sprinkled onto samples, according to a new study.
The cheapest and most common microscopes use white light to magnify objects, but the nature of light and the limitations of our eyes mean those microscopes can’t image things smaller than bacteria. Other microscopy techniques, which use lasers, metamaterials and electron beams to image microscopic and nanoscopic worlds, can exceed such limits. But they are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to use, and they can kill live samples.
Glass microspheres about the size of red blood cells, however, described March 1 in Nature Communications, act like tiny magnifying glasses and bring normally invisible structures into sight. Stitching the microspheres’ images together with software could create unprecedented white-light photos.
“We have broken the theoretical limits of optical microscopy in white light,†said engineer Lin Li of the University of Manchester, a co-author of the study. “The surprising thing is the simplicity. One hundred dollars buys you about 100 million microspheres. Using conventional optical microscopes, almost anyone can do this.â€
The microspheres may allow microscopes to image viruses in action or the insides of living cells. But the technique may not be as simple to use as the study’s authors say.
An independent group of microscope experts at Purdue University, led by physicist and engineer Vladimir Shalaev, couldn’t replicate similar images on their first attempt. But Shalaev said they’re working with the paper’s authors to be certain they did it correctly.
“It can be very hard to reproduce new experiments,†Shalaev said. “I have to admit this all sounds too good to be true. But if it is true, it’s going to be a huge, huge development.â€
Microscope resolution is limited by diffraction, or the bending and spreading of light when it encounters obstacles like glass. What we see through microscopes is also restricted by cells in the eye’s retina, which can only detect light with wavelengths between 390 and 750 nanometers (between violet and red colors, respectively).
Image: Nature Publishing Group
These limitations prevent us from directly seeing objects smaller than 200 nanometers — just larger than a rabies virus or Mycoplasma, the smallest-known bacteria. Physicists and engineers have circumvented the 200-nanometer barrier with electron microscopy, laser fluorescence and nanoscale metamaterials, but they’re expensive, kill live samples or are difficult to use. So Li and his colleagues sought a new method.
In one experiment with glass beads between 2 microns and 9 microns wide, they could see 50-nanometer-wide holes in gold foil, or 8 times beyond the limits of conventional microscopy (image below). They were also able to see the tiny data grooves on a Blu-Ray disc (image above).
“This is quite cheap and easy to implement, while the alternatives are far more expensive and complicated,†Li said.
Physicist and engineer Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research, has used metamaterials to image objects as small as 70 nanometers in size. He doesn’t think the new results are unreliable or untrue, but does see some limitations to the technique.
“They looked at artificial structures. Metal lines, holes and such. These are not a virus or bacteria, which are much, much more difficult to see because they move around,†Smolyaninov said. “I tried to do this before but couldn’t convince myself it was real. If they can pull it off, I’ll be extremely happy.â€
Image: Top row: Three blocks of lines etched into a metal surface, as seen with a scanning electron microscope, with bunched-up microspheres covering the bottom block (left). The top blocks of lines aren't visible with a light microscope, but under the microspheres they are (right). Bottom row: A gold surface with 50-nanometer holes punched in it, as seen with SEM. A microsphere covers the bottom right (left). The same mesh, with the holes visible under the microsphere with a light microscope (right). Nature Publishing Group
Image: Top row: A Blu-Ray disc’s 100- and 200-nanometer grooves under a Scanning Electron Microscope (left). The same grooves are visible using microspheres with a light microscope (right). Bottom row: A 1,000-nanometer star etched into a DVD under SEM (left). The same star as seen through a microsphere (right). (Nature Publishing Group)
Citation: “Optical virtual imaging at 50 nm lateral resolution with a white-light nanoscope.†Zengbo Wang, Wei Guo, Lin Li, Boris Luk’ yanchuk, Ashfaq Khan, Zhu Liu, Zaichun Chen &
Minghui Hong. Nature Communications, Vol. 2 Issue 218. March 1, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1211
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