Our good friends at Between the Eyes (the production company we used to share an office with in Soho) have just made their first feature film “Shifty” which is being released this weekend.
If anyone’s at a loose end this weekend I’d definitely recommend going to see it – it’s on at the VUE cinema at Longwell Green.
This is cool: using lighting/projections to help decision makers envisage how their cities could be transformed (for the better, obviously): Guerrilla Lighting
(I’m going to start off by emphasizing that this is not for production use, it is just a bit of harmless fun while I was looking at the structure of python’s bytecode, and I thought it might be interesting reading for others)
There have been quite a few hacks in the past to add tail-call optimisation to python – normally in cross-interpreter python, but while I was playing with the byteplay module thought I’d have a go at writing a function that re-compiles a function with basic tail-call optimisation inserted.
My method is basic, and converts tail-recursive calls in a (pure) function into jump statements.
Useful blog piece on hard metrics and anecdotal evidence for the value of social media. Via Power Shift – Social Media Blog
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Knowing how to make careful use of both measured and anecdotal evidence is important.
Things that can be objectively measured meaningfully *should* be measured, and decisions should be based on that hard evidence.
Where objective measurement is either *very difficult*, or conceptually *not possible*, anecdotal evidence is a powerful input to decision-making.
Useful article from this week’s Economist about how the economic downturn is affecting marketing strategies. Final three paragraphs very interesting – snippets below.
“Interest in things such as green products and healthy foods will continue to grow in a post-crisis world, but customers will be less willing to pay a premium for them, and will demand more value for money when they do.”
“The downturn will also accelerate the use of social media, such as blogs and social-networking sites, by consumers looking for intelligence on firms and their products [...] Social media make it harder for brands to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes, but they also offer canny companies a powerful new channel through which to promote their wares and test new products and pricing strategies.”
“…this recession has triggered a wholesale reappraisal by shoppers of the value that their habitual brands deliver. The winners will be those that adapt intelligently to the new reality. The losers will be those who think they can win simply by telling consumers to ‘Want It!’”
Science undertaken in the Bristol region affects many aspects of people’s lives both here and across the world. These films commissioned by Science City Bristol capture the essence of what makes this a special place.
Science City Bristol: “The region is the centre of the second largest silicon design cluster in the world – second only to Silicon Valley in California – and has influenced everything from the development of the mobile phone and digital TV. It is also a hotbed of creative industries, well known globally for Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit, but increasingly a world-leading location for alternate reality gaming and pervasive media.”
(Via Pervasive Media Studio.)
The Australian government has ditched its plan to fund a privately built fiber-to-the-node broadband network. Instead, it will directly build an open-access, 100Mbps+, fiber-to-the-home network that will reach 90 percent of Australian homes within eight years.
Bristol – indeed the whole UK – should do the same. Open-access fibre networks were very much the subject of the NextGen event at Watershed last week.
Extremely fast networks (using fibre) are core social and economic infrastructure. There’s no prize for being last to this.
Found via Ars Technica: Aussies to build own open-access fiber backbone
The mighty Bajaj makes it further into the West Country – Totnes Rickshaws have two auto-rickshaws in finest black and yellow – and they run on converted cooking oil.
Here’s mine – it’s a truck and carries half a ton.
I’d love to see rickshaws running in Bristol. Interested?
Update on the Volvo Truck game I posted a while ago. I’m following this story because:
1. I like big trucks.
2. We’re interested in non-obvious brands and organisations using social media intelligently (and people talking successfully to a niche audience).
3. Big Lorry Blog is an interesting success story of a print magazine creating a strong online following through good blogging.
