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Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Network Rich media Technology Virtual Reality

Milwaukee has Google street views!

Milwaukee has just been added by Google to their cool interactive Street View component of Google Maps? What a cool technology for the city and organizations to exploit in Google’s popular mapping service.

milwaukee street view via google

So feel free to email anyone and send a link permitting visitors to interactively tour Milwaukee via Google’s panoramic street view component. No mention in local media (newspapers, TV or radio) about Milwaukee joining this cool web tool.

With linking and embedding supporting this will provide a great resource for Web2.0 tools as well….like building the interactive frame right into your blog:

View Larger Map

Milwaukee joins great cities including San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, New York City, Boston and Orlando with support for Google’s street view technology.

It may surprise some around town that many established cities (including Seattle) are not yet supporting street view.

Wish the resolution of their camera was better….but its a cool start.

Tags: Google Maps, street view, interactive, VR, panoramic photography,
Web2.0, cool, trends

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Design Education Globalization Milwaukee Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest read: Making Globalization Work

If you were first introduced to globalization via Tom Friedman‘s The World Is Flat, you may be interested to learn more about this wave of economics. Many point to the recent book by Joseph Stiglitz called Making Globalization Work. This is a follow-up to his 2003 book Globalization and Its Discontents.

Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia. He served as Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1995-97. He followed that appointment by serving as Chief Economist and Senior VP of the World Bank from 1997-2000. Stiglitz was one of three to receive the 2001 Noble Prize in economics.

He accurately addresses areas of economic globalization that continue to fail across the globe in shaping market opportunities of underdeveloped nations. Needless to say the real golden rule applies: He who has the Gold makes the rules.

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Milwaukee

Call Mr. Plow…

Live in the Midwest? There is a good chance your local DPW is plowing your streets today (following the winter storm warning) without really effecting driving conditions ten minutes later.  I’m standing infront of my driveway in this photo:greenfield snow emergency

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Design Education Milwaukee Reading Technology

Latest read: Beautiful Evidence

The holiday is a perfect time to catch up on reading and must admit Beautiful Evidence from Edward Tufte is a very refreshing look at aspects of visual evidence we simply overlook in everyday life.
Beautiful EvidenceWith so many amazing lessons regarding the presentation of data I found Chapter 6 the best as it addresses PowerPoint.

The issue Corruption in Evidence Presentations: A Consumer’s Guide to Effects Without Causes, Cherry Picking, Overreaching, Chartjunk, and the Rage to Conclude. Considering we all sit through too many PowerPoint presentations that corrupt the truth…this should be mandatory reading.

To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and moral activity.

So the next time you sit in a presentation – be truthful! I must admit to drifting into Chartjunk myself at times (yikes) before reading The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within last year. This learning forced me to approach communicating via PowerPoint…Keynote more accurately as defined by Tufte. And this began with eliminating all the bullets. His chapter on Sparklines is pretty impressive as well.

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Design Education Globalization Internet2 Milwaukee Network Technology

Internet2 – NLR breakup

i2 nlrThe on-again, off-again relationship between Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail has hit another snag. Maybe permanently.

At the Internet2’s member meeting last December in Chicago the board announced the merger was off. Then less than three months later both organizations announced they would merge…and even set up a website. This was also outlined at the 2007 WiscNet Future Technology Conference report of the WiscNet Internet2 Working Group.

Well now almost a year later we are still awaiting for the outcome. Again, it appears the merge is now “formally off”…just like last December. Arg!
–Give it six months and we’ll review where both parties are sitting at the high speed network table.

Tags: Internet2, NLR, optical network, merger, globalization, network, WiscNet, trends