 Fwix, a website for local news, aims to be a “real-time local newswire” for your hometown. Offering a combination of traditional content pulled from newspapers and blogs along with items submitted by citizen journalists, the site reads more like a location-based lifestream than a typical news site. Key to the site’s success will be the inclusion of user-generated content coming in from iPhone submissions. The company plans to launch an updated version of their Fwix iPhone application this week which will allow anyone to file news stories, photos, and videos from anywhere, all geo-tagged thanks to the iPhone’s GPS location data.
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| Researchers at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, have demolished the previous world record on the constant pi, more than doubling the amount of decimals to 2.5 trillion. They used a massive parallel computer called the T2K Tsukuba System. |
The T2K Tsukuba System is a 640-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95 trillion floating-point operations per second. The T2K calculated a total of 2,576,980,377,524 decimal places in 73 hours 36 minutes, which is a small fraction of the 600 hours taken by the previous record holders—Hitachi and the University of Tokyo—who calculated only 1.2 trillion places. Read more at gizmodo.com |
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has issued a “special pardon” to two American journalists convicted of sneaking into the country illegally, and he ordered them released during a visit by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, North Korean media reported early Wednesday. |
| The release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee was a sign of North Korea’s “humanitarian and peaceloving policy,” the Korean Central News Agency reported.Read more at news.yahoo.com |
Last week we got an e-mail message from Becky Smith announcing that she was closing her Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea due to the economic climate. She’s not the first casualty in this cratering art market — in the last six months galleries like Roebling Hall, Clementine and Guild & Greyshkul have all shuttered — but T Magazine has had a long, fruitful relationship with the artists Smith has represented over the last decade. (In fact, back in 2000, Deborah Solomon profiled Smith, a Yale painting grad-turned-Greenpoint gallerist in “How to Become an Instant Art Star” in the Times Sunday magazine.) From Adam Cvijanovic’s epic landscape murals to Sharon Core’s photographic homages to Wayne Thiebaud’s everyday food items to the extravagent paper cake Kirsten Hassenfeld created for a T wedding bonus, Smith’s artists elevated our pages with intelligence, ingenuity and brilliant craftsmanship. Though she’ll be working with these artists privately, we hope this gallery closing is not an actual bellwether of things to come in the art world. As Smith lamented in her note, “I tried to have a strong and distinct voice and found the art world to be a very bizarre place to navigate. It’s my sincere hope that the closing of Bellwether is a wake-up call and that the collectors come back in support of young art.” Read more at themoment.blogs.nytimes.com |
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