Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Email this to someoneShare on FacebookShare on VkontakteShare on Vkontakte

A Plane Crash, A Glacier, And An Entrepreneur: How Icelandair Opened Up Air Travel For Everyone

But Eliasson refused to give up. He was a fiercely ambitious man on a mission that ended up changing the face of the airline industry. Through force of will, he and his cofounders invented the budget transatlantic flight and opened up Iceland to the rest of the world. His efforts laid the groundwork for Iceland to transform itself from one of Europe’s poorest nations to the most developed nation on earth by 2008.

Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Email this to someoneShare on FacebookShare on VkontakteShare on Vkontakte

Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated!

The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane University calls this “Library Public Domain.” She and her students helped bring the first scanned books of this era available online in a collection named for the author of the bill making this necessary: The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. Thousands more books will be added in the near future as we automate. We hope this will encourage libraries that have been reticent to scan beyond 1923 to start mass scanning their books and other works, at least up to 1942.

Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Email this to someoneShare on FacebookShare on VkontakteShare on Vkontakte

Need 7 million different label designs?

Millions of Italians can now say they own a one-of-a-kind Nutella jar. In February, 7 million jars appeared on shelves in Italy, all of them boasting a unique label design. And here’s a weird twist: Every single one of those millions of labels was designed by…an algorithm?

Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Email this to someoneShare on FacebookShare on VkontakteShare on Vkontakte

Neuroarchitecture

We now know, for example, that buildings and cities can affect our mood and well-being, and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit.
Yet urban architects have often paid scant attention to the potential cognitive effects of their creations on a city’s inhabitants. The imperative to design something unique and individual tends to override considerations of how it might shape the behaviours of those who will live with it. That could be about to change.

Tweet about this on TwitterPin on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Email this to someoneShare on FacebookShare on VkontakteShare on Vkontakte

Istanbul’s city planners have a problem: too much history

When it came to choosing the exact location of the first tunnel spanning the Bosporus—the narrow strait that divides the European and Asian sides of Istanbul and links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara—one of the principal considerations was how to avoid encountering any archeological marvels.