TO DO (OR NOT TO DO) LIST

Image via CSM website.

Granary Square looking all summery.

Conference rehearsal. And in your right hand side there's the bar ;)

This Wednesday 18th of June the second round of Degree Shows at my uni, Central Saint Martins, starts. I've seen the making of wonderful exhibitions to be like MA Narrative Environments, MA Architecture and MA Textile Futures and I cannot wait to have a proper look when they're ready. My course, MA Innovation Management, had also been working hard to put together a great conference night that will be the opening of our show.

Our lecturers will be Susie McKenna, Director of Hackney Empire, Dr. Carl Reynolds founder of the NHS Hack Days and Indy Saha, Director of Creative Strategy at Google Creative Labs. You can also have a look at all the students projects, the insights and opportunities for innovation we discover during of our final dissertation process (warm up with the articles in our website). I (Ana) will be there, as well as a lot of nice collaborators of the Procrastinator: Marie, Rita, Kerilyn & Jonny.

All the info of our show Exploiting Chaos: Innovation in the Making is available in our website. Tickets are now sold out, but most probably if you want to have a look (and a drink) the night of the 18th you should definitely come along around 7:30! (:

This is the moment we've been waiting and working for several months now, come and share our happiness and exhaustion with us!

(Also I have two extra tickets for the Private Show, if you want them, tweet me!)

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 8th of June Edition

EDITORIAL

This week edition our News section features articles about the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and John Oliver explaining Net Neutrality; also, a couple of infographic, one about gay rights in the world and another one about the economic split in Latin America between Mercosur and the Pacific Alliance. A glimpse into the humanoid robotics movement in Japan in our Science & Technology section. The future of work when (and if) robots take over and Van Gogh's ear in Design, Business & Innovation. In Culture & Entertainment we feature a moving portrait project by photographer Sasha Maslov with some veterans of the Second World War; and in a lighter note a fun campaign where glasses transform impressionism turns into hyperrealism. La Guía del Perro share with us how Panda-Dog craze sweeps China and how to tell if your dog is putting on weight, check In Dog We Trust.

Happy Sunday and happy reading!


NEWS

Photo via The Independent.

This past week The Independent published an article about Tiananmen Square 25th anniversary – the massacre as it happened as told by Michael Fathers, The Independent's then Asia Editor, who was there. These were his dispatches from the atrocity. It is a quarter of a century since the People's Army put down China's incipient protest movement with shocking brutality.  'Rows of troops advanced slowly, shooting directly into the crowd.' Read full article in The Independent. E.T.P. 18'

Meanwhile in 2014, China blocked Google ahead of Tiananmen Square anniversary to slience its discussion. Read article in Mashable E.T.P. 3'

"Being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender is illegal in almost 80 countries, and in at least five of them is still punishable by death. In honour of the International day against homophobia and transphobia on 17 May, explore the legal situation for LGBT people around sex, marriage or civil partnerships, adoption, workplace discrimination and hate crime by region, country and overall population." Great interactive infographic made by Feilding Cage, Tara Herman and Nathan Good. Have a look in The Guardian.

I really enjoyed this video of John Oliver explaining Net Neutrality. It's an easy and fun way of understanding a very serious problem that I hope we don't have to face anytime soon. "John Oliver took on net neutrality on Last Week Tonight in the way only he can on Sunday evening. "They should call it cable company fuckery," Oliver said. After tearing into the FCC, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and the Obama administration, Oliver called for help from someone unexpected — Internet trolls. Oliver pointed viewers (and, more importantly, web commenters) to visit www.fcc.gov/comments to vent about the FCC proposal, which was opened for comment in mid May. "This is the moment you were made for, commenters," Oliver said." Read full article and watch the video in Mashable. E.T.P. 17'

Finally Latin America's economic split explained by a Bloomberg graphic. The inflation one is a beauty: "Latin America is divided between fast-growth countries along the Pacific coast and stragglers facing the Atlantic." Have a closest look in Bloomberg. E.T.P. 3'

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Photo via Wired.

Joseph Flaherty in Wired: "Japan is famous for its robotics industry which has developed everything from faceless industrial robots that power factories to cybernetic cats that provide companionship to the elderly. There’s also a subculture of scientists trying to create robots that could pass as humans and London-based photographer Luisa Whitton has captured their stories in a series called What About the Heart?" Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via Fast Company.

Nathan Han, a 15-year-old from Boston fascinated by bioinformatics won the first prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for creating a computer program that can predict how harmful gene mutations related to cancer might be. Read full story by Ariel Schwartz in Fast Company. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

"In the past 50 years, the number of people working in manufacturing, government, and agriculture jobs have all gone down or flat-lined. As technology infiltrates parts of the labor market that it could never reach before, employment of people who do repetitive or task-oriented jobs has seen less need for human oversight or action. And your job could very likely be next." Thor Benson asks in Fast Company what will the economy look like when the robots take your job? Read article here. E.T.P: 5'

Photo via The New York Times.

"A model of Vincent van Gogh’s left ear — you know, the ear — is on display at a German museum.

 Created using 3D printers and genetic material from a living relative of van Gogh, the Dutch painter, it was shaped to be the exact size of his ear and is kept alive in a nourishing liquid.

It is the first major work from the German-born artist Diemut Strebe, who is based in Boston. Ms. Strebe, 47, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that she had spent three years working with a team of scientists to regrow the ear that van Gogh is said to have cut off in 1888." This is definitely a really original way of procrastination I would say. Read article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 2'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Dmytro Verholjak; Markova village, Ivano-Frankivs’k region, Ukraine. Via The New Yorker.

Faces of the Second World War. In 2010, while visiting Russia for an exhibition of his work, the photographer Sasha Maslov took the first portrait for what became his current project, “Veterans.” The portrait is of Piotr Dmitrievych Koshkin, a Red Army plane mechanic who served in the Second World War. Inspired, Maslov began a four-year project photographing and interviewing people who lived through the war. His subjects include not only soldiers but also medics, engineers, partisans, members of various resistance movements, prisoners of war, Holocaust survivors, and civilians who suffered as a result of the conflict. All of these people, Maslov told me, were those “who experienced the war in a dramatic way, in their own skin.”Read full article and have a look at the photos in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6'

"In a campaign that's new to us but appears to have been running for a while now, Y&R Paris has created a series of ads for eyewear retailer KelOptic showing impressionist paintings brought into focus. The tagline is "Turning impressionism into hyperrealism." Another case of advertising sullying some of mankind's greatest artistry? Sure. But also pretty awesome." Have a look in AdWeek. E.T.P 3'

IN DOG WE TRUST

Photo: the charming René-Charles via his Instagram.

Hello dog lover!

Hope you're up to something really fun today! Here are some interesting links for you:

Panda-Dog craze sweeps China

Dog's breakfasts boots search performance, says study

How to tell if your furry friend is packing extra pounds

Interesting. Owning a dog is linked to reduced heart risk

European pet industry grows to € 8.5 Billion a year

Video of the week: Blind Kellar plays fetch

Enjoy your sunday! And follow René-Charles on Instagram

-

In Dog We Trust is edited by: Carola Melguizo from La Guía del Perro. 

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 1st of June Edition

EDITORIAL


This week's edition include an article about the controversial European elections highlighting that the results are only the reflections of what it awaits when the left (in this particular case, but it can be the other way around) fails to live up to its promises. Self-driving cars and surveillance is it something that we should be worrying about? Read about it in our Science & Technology section. In Design, Business and Innovation the cheapest 3-D Printer developed by Frog Ventures, and why is the dead of the hompage give rise to news that's more about readers? Nan Goldin taking children and Instagram via Dazed Digital and an interesting discussion on the perspectives of humanities Ph.Ds graduates via The Atlantic in our Culture & Entertainment section. In Dog We Trust talks about breeds and sterotypes, what happens if your dog behaves differently than he is "supposed" to, and introduce us to the incredibly cute Vegas, the boston.

Happy Sunday, happy June and happy reading!


NEWS

Illustration via Jean Jullien.

"The extraordinary success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, in France, and of other right-wing, populist parties has, with good reason, been the main story of last weekend’s European Parliamentary elections. Running on an anti-euro, anti-immigration platform, Le Pen won a historic twenty-five per cent of the vote, handily outpolling France’s main conservative party, the U.M.P., which earned only twenty-one per cent, and trouncing the Socialist Party of President François Hollande, which received an alarmingly small fourteen per cent. But Sunday’s election also produced another surprising, historic result, which has received much less attention: in Italy, Matteo Renzi, of the Democratic Party, won forty-one per cent of the vote, the largest total ever for a left-of-center party in Italy, a curious countertrend on a day marked by the advance of the right.
Placed in juxtaposition, the result in Italy helps us to understand why the vote in France turned out as it did; the French election could serve as a sobering warning to Renzi about what may await him if he fails to live up to his promises." Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 5'

Photo Reuters via The Economist.

The World Cup is still two weeks away, but for children worldwide (plus disturbing number of adults), the race to complete the Panini Brazil 2014 sticker book started long ago. Panini, an Italian firm, hast produced  sticker albums for World Cups since the tournament in Mexico in 1970; this year's version has 640 stickers to collect. The market for the stickers is not just for kids, however; it is also for micro-economis. Getting every slot filled delivers an early lesson in probability; the value of statistical tests; the laws of supply and demand; and the importance of liquidity. Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 3'

THE World Cup is still two weeks away, but for children worldwide (plus disturbing numbers of adults), the race to complete the Panini Brazil 2014 sticker book started long ago. Panini, an Italian firm, has produced sticker albums for World Cups since the tournament in Mexico in 1970; this year’s version has 640 stickers to collect (Brazilians are being forced to find nine sponsor cards, too). The market for the stickers is not just for kids, however; it is also for micro-economists. Getting every slot filled delivers an early lesson in probability; the value of statistical tests; the laws of supply and demand; and the importance of liquidity. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/ee/tr/theeconomicsofpaninifootballstickers#sthash.QXGp6ZiJ.dpuf

THE World Cup is still two weeks away, but for children worldwide (plus disturbing numbers of adults), the race to complete the Panini Brazil 2014 sticker book started long ago. Panini, an Italian firm, has produced sticker albums for World Cups since the tournament in Mexico in 1970; this year’s version has 640 stickers to collect (Brazilians are being forced to find nine sponsor cards, too). The market for the stickers is not just for kids, however; it is also for micro-economists. Getting every slot filled delivers an early lesson in probability; the value of statistical tests; the laws of supply and demand; and the importance of liquidity. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-13?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/ee/tr/theeconomicsofpaninifootballstickers#sthash.QXGp6ZiJ.dpuf

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Image via Wired.

Camille Francois in Wired contends that self-driving cars will turn surveillance woes into a mainstream worry. "In the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations, our society is struggling to equip itself with the laws and public understanding necessary to deal with the spread of technology into every corner of our lives.
Self-driving cars are one place we can start to get it right. They provide yet another example of the challenges to autonomy and freedom brought by technology, and have the potential to bring the debate home for people who don’t feel as concerned by privacy issues related to email and laptops." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 7'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via Fast Company.

A 3-D printer called the New Matter MOD-t was launched in Indiegogo a couple of days ago. It’s expected to cost $250, making it the most affordable 3-D printer to date. "It’s also being billed as one of the simplest 3-D printers: users buy and download designs for chess pieces or kitchen utensils or whatever they want to make in a storefront that crosses the App Store with Etsy. They can then edit these objects--changing size or adding texture--about as easily as adding an Instagram filter. The printer, engineered by inventor Steve Schell, is expected to be built with a third of the parts of its peers, allowing it to reach that $250 price point. The MOD-t is the first release of Frog Ventures." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via The Atlantic.

What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News. Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic: "Why should the death of homepages give rise to news that's more about readers? Because homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers. These digital grazers have shown again and again that they aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, self-help, awe, and outrage dressed up news. Digitally native publishers are pretty good at pumping this kind of stuff out. Hence quizzes, hence animals, hence 51 Photos That Show Women Fighting Sexism Awesomely. Even serious publishing companies know that self-help and entertainment often outperform outstanding reporting." Read full article in The Atlantic. E.T.P. 5'