PSFK Author:
Dan Gould

A major German publisher is preparing to print a one volume “encyclopedic yearbook” of popular Wikipedia articles in September. The book will cost 19.95 euros, with 1 euro of each sale going back to Wikipedia. This is a questionable move, as there are no plans to compensate the multitudes of volunteers that produce the site. According to the rules of the encyclopedia, this is legal. Content on the site is free for use as long as you credit Wikipedia as the source.

Fair use of free content? We’re still mulling it over.

Read Write Web: Wikipedia Gets Published - Should Writers Get Paid?

Delta are introducing a new design for their international coach seating, scheduled to roll out in 2010. The staggered design, called “Cozy Suite” adds 2 inches of extra leg room and makes it easier for the window passengers to get to the aisle (without trampling all over your neighbors). The addition of the wrap around head rest also provides a much needed alternative to the nearest stranger’s shoulder.

Wired: The Cozy Suite - Building a Better Airplane Seat

Behance has introduced Creative Index as a site for creative professionals to find work, connect with each other and share portfolios. The free profiles are pretty easy to set up and the interface makes searching simple. We like that the site’s definition of creative professional is very inclusive; categories ranging from advertising, graphic design, illustration to acrobatics, costume design and ice sculpture can be found on the site.

Creative Index

In response to an economy “in flux”and as a way to drive business to their stores, Wal-Mart is lowering prices on many of their pharmacy products. The giant retailer is now offering over 1,000 OTC medications for $4 or less and drastically reducing the cost of many prescription drugs. They are offering select drugs at $4 for a 30 day prescription and $10 for a 90 day supply. Target and Kmart offer similar programs, but U.S. supermarket chains Publix and Meijer are taking this idea to the next level by giving away generic antibiotics.

Reuters: Wal-Mart expanding it’s low cost drug program

Residents of Los Angeles have come together to save their beloved taco trucks. Under a new ordinance, trucks would have to follow overly strict rules about where and when they can set up shop. Non compliance would mean fines, misdemeanor charges and possible jail time. There are similar laws in place now that are rarely enforced. The NY Times explains:

This is the kind of city where you can pave over a freeway’s carpool lanes with toll roads, and few will complain. You can propose a 40-story skyrise in the center of Hollywood, and hardly anyone two miles to the west will take notice. You can squander public money, close down the ports and flatten landmarks, and many residents of this sprawling metropolis will simply yawn and move on.

But this is also a food obsessed city with rich Hispanic cultural traditions, and tacos have crossed the miles of road and class divides.

“Taco trucks are iconic here,” said Aaron Sonderleiter, a teacher from the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and one of the petition founders. “You go to one and you see black, people, white people, old people, young people. They really capture a microcosm of L.A.”

Nearly 5,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the new law at saveourtacotrucks.org

NYT: Hungry Angelenos Rally Around the Taco

Volvo has come out with an ambitious plan to eliminate any injuries or deaths in their cars by 2020. After that, they want to go further and design cars that don’t get into accidents at all. Though it may sound far fetched, automobile industry experts believe it is possible.

Reuters reports:

Automakers, parts suppliers, governments and global agencies from the United Nations to the OECD are all looking at ways to relegate to memory the roughly 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes each year.

But in what some analysts see as a bid to hold its lead in consumer perceptions of safety, the Swedish carmaker now owned by Ford is the first to set a target date to eliminate death and injury in its cars.

“I think if you look into the future, we as a community will not accept that we have injuries,” said Jan Ivarsson, leader of the Volvo safety team with specialists in everything from biomechanics to engineering to behavioral science.

[via The Brilliance]

Interesting thoughts from Nick Currie’s blog, playing off a Vito Acconci rant about the changing concepts of cities and locality: He proposes that being in the physical space of a city becomes less relevant when you can have all of the information and idea-resources at your fingertips with a computer.

“A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary,” Acconci says. “If you can have all the information in front of you on a computer, do you need the actual city? The notions of a city now don’t seem as separate from notions of “suburb” and notions of “rural” as they used to. “City” is seen to be spreading… maybe a city starts to be more portable. If you can carry all the information from a city, does that mean you carry the city with you rather than you go into a city? Do you carry your own city, does each person now have the possibility of carrying a portable city rather than installing himself or herself in an actual city?”

Currie also questions what local really means. When it’s possible to create your own mix and match “bubble existence” out of whatever culture or mico-tribe you best fit in with (either online, or in a physical space), the notions of a cohesive local neighborhood culture begins to fall apart.

Because of globalisation, immigration, computers, your “local experience” can now consist entirely of foreigners. Most of my local business encounters in Neukolln are with Turks, most of my socialisation with Japanese. The cut-rate atomic German city I live in half the time has been cut-and-pasted, sliced and diced, filtered and fixed, almost as much as the bit-rate digital city I live in the other half.

and from the blog’s comments:

I feel like the music scene I’m part of is a lot more a “virtual” scene than one based in any city. Half of us spend the majority of their time on the road, but we all know each other and collaborate and play shows with each other and keep track of each other online. It’s exactly what the concept of a music scene has always been except without the common locality.

What does this mean for society if everyone starts living this kind of collage life? Although this distributed living can be good for the bubble culture itself, I’m wondering if it hurts the stability of the physical local culture?

Click Opera:Portable, personal and composite, fine. But “local”, what does that mean?

Usually found in areas with scarce resources, the practice of “Urban Mining” is growing around the world. The idea behind urban mining is to extract all of the precious metals hidden within old electronics to re-use or recycle into new products. The rising price of gold, silver, copper and iridium are driving this practice into the mainstream.

Reuters reports:

The materials recovered are reused in new electronics parts and the gold and other precious metals are melted down and sold as ingots to jewellers and investors as well as back to manufacturers who use gold in the circuit boards of mobile phones because gold conducts electricity even better than copper.

“It can be precious or minor metals, we want to recycle whatever we can,” said Tadahiko Sekigawa, president of Eco-System Recycling Co which is owned by Dowa Holdings Co Ltd.

A tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams (0.18 ounce) of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield 150 grams (5.3 ounce) or more, according to a study by Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, another recycling firm.

[via Cryptogon]

Reason Magazine has a long and fascinating article about an artist’s collective and squat in Berkeley called The Shipyard. After having the electricity shut off by the city, the collective was stuck with having to generate its own power. They tried various methods such as solar and biodiesel, but struck gold with an archaic process called gasification.

In a nutshell, gasification is a process of heating up any carbon-rich material in a special container that produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen which is then burned as fuel. These materials includes coal, petroleum and more importantly, biomass, plastic and items we would consider garbage. Besides running the squat on gasification, they also successfully powered cars by the process.

Perhaps the best news of all is that the waste product (called carbon char) is actually beneficial for the environment.

The key in making a 21st century environmentally friendly process out of an old 20th century machine is the char left over after gasification. In the Amazon rain forest, scientifically mysterious processes create a charcoal known as terra preta (“black earth”) or “agri-char,” which has been used for thousands of years to enrich the soil and boost agricultural productivity. More recently, it got a glowing write-up in Scientific American in May 2007 and made Wired’s “JargonWatch” this March.

By taking the leftover carbon char and plowing it back into the ground, gasification might do more than the mostly carbon-neutral act of burning biofuel. The process is potentially carbon-negative, keeping most of the carbon in the ground rather than the atmosphere while helping plants grow faster, which takes still more carbon out of the atmosphere.

Reason Magazine: Power To The People