NEWSWEEK asked descendants of key figures in civil rights history to write letters to their ancestors describing their thoughts and feelings about the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. And to add to the record, we’ve collected letters from students and notable figures to Obama, and discussed the power of words with will.i.am and the inaugural poet.
Google Maps and Google Earth are the centerpiece of NYCGo, a new information and reference project launched by the New York City government to provide resources to both visitors and locals. Wednesday’s launch announced the debut of NYCGo.com, a Google Maps-fueled local search and reference site, as well as the unveiling of the renovated New York City Information Center a few blocks north of the tourist-heavy Times Square district.
NYCGo.com contains not just Google map and search data, but also travel deals from Travelocity and local content from what-to-do powerhouse Time Out New York, nightlife culture magazine Paper, the New York Observer, and eco-living guide Greenopia.
The information center, located on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, is equally Googly. The city’s technocratic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, even contributed a guest post to the official Google blog to announce it: “The Information Center features interactive map tables, powered by the Google Maps API for Flash, that let you navigate venues and attractions as well as create personalized itineraries, which can be printed, emailed or sent to mobile devices,” the blog post explained. “Additionally, there’s a gigantic video wall that utilizes Google Earth to display a 3D model of New York City on which you can map out personalized itineraries.”
Bloomberg has been aggressive about promoting tech initiatives during his time in office, from a wind power plan (part of the much bigger “GreeNYC” project) and a city-run venture firm. Under his watch, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened its New York satellite office, taking over several floors of the historic former Port Authority building downtown.
A side note: the video provided by Google shows the “interactive map tables” in the new information center, and they look a whole lot like Microsoft Surface units. But they aren’t, a representative from NYCGo tells us. They’re custom-made.
BERGEN-BELSEN, Germany — Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called “Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust.” He asked a question one evening during a break: “Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?”
Consider it raised.
The new memorial is an immense concrete and glass museum emerging from a copse of trees beside the cemetery of mass graves (there are more than 70,000 bodies buried there), which had been the camp site. The permanent exhibition is a model of its kind, focused on the meticulous and sober reconstruction of the past. From time to time the present literally intrudes with a bang, though, when practice rounds of tank fire from the British military base next door boom over the treetops.
Putting your thoughts in 140 characters and sharing them with the world is shaping up to be more popular than “digging” your favorite news. According to new market share numbers from Hitwise, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is now more popular than Digg’s social news aggregation service. Hitwise compared both sites in a report released Tuesday and is basing the market share ranking by page views.
Unfortunate events such as the Hudson River plane crash and also more fortunate ones like Obama’s Inauguration, led to more mainstream exposure for Twitter and moved it above one notch above Digg in Hitwise’s hierarchy – Twitter is now ranked at 84, with Digg at 85.
When the US Airways Flight crashed into the Hudson River late last week, the first reports of the incident appeared on Twitter, including amateur photographs that later made headlines around the world and transformed Janis Krums into a celebrity of the moment. Hitwise confirmed the fact that this event was one of the main factors of Twitter surpassing Digg in visits market share.
The Numbers
Twitter had a sharp but steady rise in traffic ever since August 2008, while Digg’s popularity decreased slightly.
“Nowadays one becomes an author not through one’s originality but by reading. One becomes a human being by aping others. That one is human is known not from one’s own case but by inference: one is like the others, therefore one is human. God knows whether any of us are! And in our age, when […]
“In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged. Children are always well-behaved as long as they are enjoying themselves. This is true in the strictest sense; for if they sometimes become unruly in their play, it is because they are already beginning to be bored — boredom is already approaching, […]
“The existing individual becomes concrete in his experience, and in going on he still has his experience with him, and hence may at any moment lose it; he has it with him not as something one has in a pocket, but his having it constitutes a definite something by which he is himself specifically determined, […]
“The loving man, he in whom there is love, hides the multitude of sins, sees not his neighbor’s fault, or, if he sees, hides it from himself and from others; love makes him blind in a sense far more beautiful than this can be said of a lover, blind to his neighbor’s sins. On the […]
“A landscape painter, whether he strives to produce an effect by a faithful rendering of the subject, or by a more ideal reproduction, perhaps leaves the individual cold, but such a picture as I have in mind produces an indescribable effect for the fact that one does not know whether to laugh or cry, and […]
“The lover discovers nothing, hence he conceals the multitude of sins which would be exposed through the discovery. The life of the lover is an expression of the apostolic precept of being a child in malice. That which the world really admires as shrewdness is an understanding of evil; wisdom is essentially the understanding of […]
“Eighteen hundred years have not contributed a jot to demonstrating the truth of Christianity; on the contrary, with steadily increasing power they have contributed to abolishing Christianity… Now, since it has been demonstrated, and on an enormous scale, that Christianity is the truth, now there is no one, almost no one, who is willing to […]
“An existential system cannot be formulated. Does this mean that no such system exists? By no means; nor is it implied in our assertion. Existence itself is a system — for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit. System and finality correspond to one another, but existence is precisely the opposite […]
