November 19, 2011
A lip dub is a type of music video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing. It is made by filming individuals or a group of people lip synching while listening to a song or any recorded audio then dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song. There is often some form of mobile audio device used such as an MP3 player. Often they look like simple music videos, although many involve a lot of preparation and production. Lip dubs can be done in a single unedited shot that often travels through different rooms and situations within a building. They have become popular with the advent of mass participatory video content sites like YouTube.
Jake Lodwick, the co-founder of video sharing website Vimeo, coined the term in 2006, in a video entitled ‘Lip Dubbing: Endless Dream.’ In the video’s description, he wrote, ‘I walked around with a song playing in my headphones, and recorded myself singing. When I got home I opened it in iMovie and added an MP3 of the actual song, and synchronized it with my video. Is there a name for this? If not, I suggest ‘lip dubbing’.’ Lodwick also directed the ‘Flagpole Sitta’ ‘office lip dub’ in 2007.
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November 18, 2011
The term collaborative consumption is used to describe an economic model based on sharing, swapping, bartering, trading or renting access to products as opposed to ownership. Technology and peer communities are enabling these old market behaviors to be reinvented in ways and on a scale never possible before.
From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa), peer-to-peer travel (CouchSurfing, Airbnb) and car sharing (Zipcar or peer-to-peer RelayRides), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what people consume but how they consume it.
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November 17, 2011
SMS language or textese is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS (short message service) communication protocol. SMS language is also common on the Internet, including in email and instant messaging. It can be likened to a rebus, an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words (e.g. ‘i <3 u’ which uses the pictogram of a heart for ‘love,’ and the letter ‘u’ replaces ‘you’).
The objective of SMS language is to use the least number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message, also as many telecommunication companies have an SMS character limit, another benefit of SMS language is to reduce the character count of a message, hence, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored.
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November 13, 2011
The Neon Museum in Las Vegas features signs from old casinos and other businesses displayed outdoors on over 6 acres. The museum is restoring the La Concha Motel lobby as its visitor center. For many years, the Young Electric Sign Company stored many of these old signs in their ‘boneyard.’ The signs were slowly being destroyed by exposure to the elements. The museum is restoring the signs and placing them around the Fremont Street Experience. The Neon Museum maintains twelve restored signs throughout Downtown Las Vegas. Some can be seen on a self-guided visitors walk through the Fremont Street Experience. Three others have been added in recent years to the median of Las Vegas Boulevard in front of the eventual site for the Neon Museum itself.
The Neon Museum is located on Las Vegas Boulevard and Bonanza, across the street from Cashman Center and along the Las Vegas downtown museum corridor. The boneyard preserves over 150 neon signs from the Nevada area. While the core of the collection is from the old Yesco Boneyard, private donations and loans have expanded the collection to the current size. Important historical pieces in the boneyard include the signage from the Moulin Rouge Hotel, the Stardust, Desert Inn and Caesar’s Palace as well as many others. Not just neon signage, the museum also houses fiberglass sculptures including a giant skull from the Treasure Island among others.
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November 13, 2011
Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) is a privately owned manufacturer of electric signs based in Salt Lake City. The company was founded by Thomas Young in 1920 and today has divisions and branches in 10 western states, as well as in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. YESCO offers a comprehensive range of services for electronic signs, including design, fabrication, installation and ongoing maintenance.
Many notable sign projects have been produced by YESCO. These include the NBC Experience globe in New York City, the historic El Capitan Theatre and Wax Museum marquees in Hollywood, the most recent incarnation of the Reno Arch and numerous icons in Las Vegas, such as Vegas Vic, the Fremont Street Experience, the Astrolabe in The Venetian and the recent Wynn Las Vegas resort sign.
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November 12, 2011
In poker, a hole cam (or pocket cam) is a camera that displays a player’s face-down cards (known as ‘hole cards’) to television viewers. The hole cam became popular in 1999 when it was first used by the BBC. In some cases, the camera is placed under a glass panel in the table and players are instructed to place their cards over the glass. In other cases, the rail of the table is elevated and a small camera placed within the rail, and players are instructed to examine their cards in the usual manner, but while they’re in front of the camera.
The goal in both cases is to allow for the filming and broadcast of the player’s hole cards to the spectators without exposing them to the other players. This has led to the audience garnering a greater understanding of what is going on at the table and an increased interest in the thought processes of the players.
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November 10, 2011
Short messages on services such as Twitter or identi.ca may be tagged by including one or more hashtags: words or phrases prefixed with the symbol ‘#,’ with multiple words concatenated, such as those in: ‘#Wikipedia is my favorite kind of #encyclopedia.’ Then, a person can search for the string ‘#Wikipedia’ and this tagged word will appear in the search engine results. These hashtags also show up in a number of trending topics websites, including Twitter’s own front page. Such tags are case-insensitive. Hashtags were invented on Twitter by Chris Messina. One phenomenon specific to the Twitter ecosystem are micro-memes, which are emergent topics for which a hashtag is created, used widely for a few days, then disappears. Other sites, such as Hashable, have adopted the hashtag to use for other reasons.
The feature has been added to other, non-short-message-oriented services, such as the user comment systems on YouTube and Gawker Media; in the case of the latter, hashtags for blog comments and directly-submitted comments are used to maintain a more constant rate of user activity even when paid employees are not logged into the website. Real-time search aggregators such as Google Real-Time Search also support hashtags in syndicated posts, meaning that hashtags inserted into Twitter posts can be hyperlinked to incoming posts falling under that same hashtag; this has further enabled a view of the ‘river’ of Twitter posts which can result from search terms or hashtags.
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November 10, 2011
Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size. Microblogs ‘allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links.’ As with traditional blogging, microbloggers post about topics ranging from the simple, such as ‘what I’m doing right now,’ to the thematic, such as ‘sports cars.’ Commercial microblogs also exist, to promote websites, services and/or products, and to promote collaboration within an organization. Some microblogging services offer features such as privacy settings, which allow users to control who can read their microblogs, or alternative ways of publishing entries besides the web-based interface. These may include text messaging, instant messaging, E-mail, or digital audio.
The first microblogs were known as tumblelogs. The term was coined by ‘why the lucky stiff’ in a blog post in 2005, while describing Christian Neukirchen’s Anarchaia: ‘Blogging has mutated into simpler forms (specifically, link- and mob- and aud- and vid- variant), but I don’t think I’ve seen a blog like Chris Neukirchen’s Anarchaia, which fudges together a bunch of disparate forms of citation (links, quotes, flickrings) into a very long and narrow and distracted tumblelog.’
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November 10, 2011
Weibo is the Chinese word for ‘microblog.’ It usually refers to one or all of the Twitter-like, China-based microblogging services, or one’s account at these services. Among the weibo services, Sina Weibo is the most visited one. Sina has used the domain name weibo.com for the service since 2011. Sometimes, the own published news of Sina.com and some other media use directly ‘Weibo’ to refer to Sina Weibo. However generally, when mentioning ‘Weibo,’ it may refer to one or all of the China-based microblogging services. After the 2009 Urumqi riots, China shut down most of the domestic weibo services, and many popular non China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have been blocked since then.
This led to the creation of services like Sina Weibo, operated by large Chinese Internet companies under the government’s control. Due to the Internet censorship in China, all of the China-based weibo services today is now controlled by various self-censorship policies and methods. They usually have blacklisted keywords list to be automatically checked, sometimes administrators check manually. Posts on sensitive topics forbidden in China (e.g. Human right, Liu Xiaobo) will be deleted and the user’s account may be blocked. However, compared to other Chinese media formats, weibo services are considered freer. Weibos are thought as influential tools that impact and change China. Some scandals and controversies such as Li Gang incident are made known to the public through weibos.
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November 10, 2011
A Sybian is a masturbation device designed for use by females, developed by dance instructor Dave Lampert in the 1980s. It consists of a saddle-like seat containing an electric motor connected to a rod that protrudes from a hole in the center. Various attachments can be added to the rod, which vibrates, rotates and may also stimulate the clitoris externally. The intensity of the movements produced can be increased or decreased through a control box attached to the Sybian’s base. Lampert and his team initially called the device Master Better, shortened to ‘MB’ for about four years before selecting a new name for it. The prefix syb was derived from Sybaris, an Ancient Greek city in southern Italy which was associated with luxurious living.
Generally, the user of the Sybian straddles the machine and inserts the attachment vaginally. The vibration and rotation can be controlled by separate on/off switches and two rotary controls. The Sybian is sold with up to four phallus-shaped washable attachments of varying sizes made from synthetic rubber. Although the Sybian has been featured in many pornographic video productions since the early 2000s, primarily on the Internet, the device came to prominence on The Howard Stern Show since the show’s arrival on Sirius Satellite Radio. Howard Stern was given a Sybian as a birthday gift in 2006 and it remains in the Stern studio for use by willing guests.
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November 10, 2011
A sex machine, also known as a fucking machine, is a mechanical device used to simulate human sexual intercourse. It is a more sophisticated version of the vibrator. These devices may be associated with, but are not limited to, BDSM play. Devices can be penetrative or extractive. A typical penetrative machine works by the transfer of rotational or reciprocating force from a motor to a directional motion on a shaft, which is tipped by a dildo. A hand-held modified reciprocating saw device is sometimes called a ‘fucksaw’ and a hand-held modified drill motor rotating device is sometimes called a ‘drilldo.’ An extractive device works like a milking machine and can be attached to the penis, breast, or other body part.
Modern automated erotic stimulation device differ from vibrators because they penetrate as well as throb. Mass attention is drawn to them on the Internet, while appetite for these powerful appliances has induced the establishment and growth of manufacturers to satisfy rising demand. Recently a new generation of these devices has hit the market under the name teledildonics. These devices are sometimes used as part of auto-erotic or partnered bondage play. Today the sex machines on the market include vacuum pumps, instruments that deliver calibrated electrical shocks to the nipples and genitals, and lifesize inflatable male and female dolls with penetrable and vibrating orifices.
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November 10, 2011
The mobile fab lab is a computer-controlled design and machining shop housed in a trailer. The first was built in 2007 by the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The mobile lab includes the same computer controlled fabrication machines found in fab labs world-wide. The fab lab trailer is 32′ long, 8′ wide, and 7′ high. The tailgate opens to add a 6′ deck at the back of the trailer. To run all the equipment in the lab at once (including AC and overhead lights) is about 20 kW.
This lab contains custom cabinetry which is example of a lab producing a part of another lab. The cabinetry was CAD-designed and fabricated on a CNC wood router similar to the wood router in the trailer. The router in the trailer is capable of making another set of cabinets. Two graffiti artists from the South Bronx were invited to design and paint the sides and top of the trailer in two weekends. It is now loaned to organizations for months or longer, typically to help create a permanent lab in that location.
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