Biochip vital monitor, self-marketing, CRAP design, the Crowd Farm, extremophile journalism…

• 1 – Implantable Biochip Could Relay Vital Health Information

  “The biochip, about the size of a grain of rice, could measure and relay such information as lactate and glucose levels in the event of a major hemorrhage, whether on the battlefield, at home or on the highway.” Snappy copy.

  (tags: chemistry blood monitoring signs vital biochip technology medicine health)

• 2 – » 10 Essential Free or Cheap Ways to Market Your Freelance Work

  “Luckily, marketing skills aren’t that difficult, once you learn some basic ideas, and for those of us on a tight budget, there are some free or cheap ways to do that.”

  (tags: promotion guerilla free cheap budget marketing business freelance)

• 3 – Copy killers (Doctorow on DRM at The Guardian)

  “DRM products make buying media less attractive, but its peddlers don’t care – their industry won’t crater when a hopeless strategy is defeated by brutal, uncaring mathematics.”

  (tags: Doctorow technology piracy copyright media electronic DRM)

• 4 – Design Better with CRAP

  “All design starts from four basic principles, abbreviated as CRAP [...] These are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.”

  (tags: typography principles style layout CSS composition design web)

• 5 – Why Do People Have Sex?

  “… new research at The University of Texas at Austin reveals hundreds of varied and complex motivations that range from the spiritual to the vengeful.” Er, OK.

  (tags: psychology emotion research motivation behaviour human sex)

• 6 – People-powered ‘Crowd Farm?’ Plan Would Harvest Energy Of Human Movement

  “The so-called “Crowd Farm,” as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, both M.Arch candidates, would turn the mechanical energy of people walking or jumping into a source of electricity.”

  (tags: innovation ecology architecture urban crowdfarm crowdsourcing technology energy)

• 7 – Wikipedia founder plans open-source search engine

  “… Wikia’s search service will also seek to make use of human editors [...] users will be invited to help untangle results by, for example, identifying the correct site for terms with multiple meanings.”

  (tags: internet results edited user crowdsourcing search Wikipedia Wikia)

• 8 – Extremophile Journalism

  “… while the physical act of researching and writing can present dramatic logistical challenges, science correspondents in some parts of the world are also faced with the worry that offending despotic or corrupt governments will result in retribution.”

  (tags: politics logistics reportage journalism science thirdworld nations developing)

• 9 – Keeping Up with the Kludges (David Louis Edelman)

  “But here’s the problem: the world is shrinking. Products and laws and programs that were once created with tens of thousands of relatively homogeneous white people in Middle America are now being exported all around the world.”

  (tags: kludge compatibility backwards culture society law programming technology)