The egyptians are green with envy

We need to put this in our magazine.  It is apparently from an exhibition for a new urban plan for Ansan at the Gyeongi Museum of Art. 

The original photos are on the designboom cut ‘n paste weblog, which has some more information.

the joint project by the four firms, BIG (copenhagen), INABA (los angeles), MAD (beijing), an mass studies (seoul) uses versatile architectural forms that change in size and use. th principals of the four offices, bjarke ingels, jeffrey inaba, yansong ma, and minsuk cho reinterpret the term ‘economies of scale’ to mean the value of a single architectural form tha functions at several scales.  The works are adaptable enough so that the same form can b enlarged or shrunk and still function as a building. they have the added capacity to dramatically change in size and transform in use from building to furniture to toy. Given today’s economic instability, the architects propose an architecture that can be sized to accommodate changes in available funding. the forms have been developed so that if a project’s investment capital decreases, it can be scaled down; alternatively, if greater financing becomes available, the same form can be scaled up. A project conceived with greater utility in mind so that the form can be enjoyed even when reduced or increased by 40, 50, or 60 percent.

Exactly how versatile architectural forms?  Look at this:

It will be fixed because I found out that Adobe Acrobat 7, two versions older than the one I’ve been using, extracts jpgs better.  And that’s not all it does better.  First of all, it’s only about 200 megabytes on install, and takes about 2 minutes.  Adobe Acrobat 9, with its Creative Suite associations, takes upwards of one hour to install on this old computer and has a disk footprint of over two gigabytes.  Acrobat 7 is faster to start up, faster to read PDF files, and the jpgs it produces from image extraction look just like the originals.  Acrobat 7 is what I wish Acrobat 9 was, and perfectly fits in with my needs.  Maybe they should reference 7 for their inevitable upgrade to 10.

Update: At the request of Mr. Rosenthol of Adobe Systems I’m including four jpg photos to illustrate the problem I’m having.  I probably should have done this in the first place:

Now I can get the same results with Acrobat 9 as I did with 7 if I extract each image as a .bmp file first and convert it to jpg with GIMP or Microsoft Paint, but that’s one extra step I’d rather not do.

I’ve chosen to go with OpenX for an advertising solution, mostly because it is free and open source.  I was originally going to just use Google AdSense, but OpenX supports both Google AdSense and its own advertising network.  And, of course, there are already OpenX Drupal modules, OpenX and OpenX Manager, which will presumably integrate seamlessly with everything else I’ve done so far.  

There is one choice that I have to make, which is to download an OpenX installation and put it up on ads.koreaittimes.com myself, or to just use a hosted OpenX solution.  I signed up for the hosted solution yesterday evening and got an email acceptance this morning just in case, but I have yet to decide which is best for the site.  The only difference seems to be that I’ll be receiving ads from an OpenX server if I use the hosted solution, which makes me wonder how fast the hosted OpenX servers are.  Also, we’ll have to start paying if we serve more than 150 million ad impressions per month, which is a nice goal to reach for but something that isn’t going to happen next week.

I got it down to 30 different categories.  There were some synonyms, a few misspellings, and a lot of different ideas that could be consolidated together.  For instance, most of the old articles about different expos and events had three types of Kickers – the first was some variation on Event Preview, the second was the event’s name, and the third was some kind of variation on Event Sketch.  It was pretty straightforward to group those all under Events.  

On the new ProsePoint web site, categories are called Channels.  After setting up the web site, and creating different channels for all 30 Kickers, the menu area started to look a little cluttered.  Today I experimented with creating different section pages on the test site, similar to the New York Times web site or CNN.  I grouped all the channels into three categories: Opinion, Business, and Technology, and then set it up the channels to only be accessible from those pages.  It seemed to be even more confusing, however, and I realized that I even think that the New York Times and CNN’s pages are confusing.  Too many sections, too much stuff not viewable from the front page.  So I wiped the test site and went with the second solution for a cluttered menu – more channel/Kicker consolidation.

After some consideration I managed to consolidate some underused channels and have the number down to 21 now.  It’s one row less in the web site layout, and looks better.  Also, each section will be more populated with archive stories (as soon as I work out some kinks with archive importation) and everyone will be happier.  

I’d like to get some feedback on the header area of the web site.  Is it too long?  On my standard screen the title, search bar, menus, and breadcrumb bar (that black and white picture panel underneath the menu) take up about 50% of the screen real estate, and readers are going to have to scroll down a lot to see the rest of the site.  Is this good, bad or does it not matter?

1.  Reorganize the front page links – There are three rows of channel links on the front page, which really pushes down the content too far.  On my 1024×768 screen it takes up way too much real estate, I hate to think what it looks like at 800×600.  I think there are about 30 channels up there now.  I have to do something about that.

2.  Online advertising – Since our web site is up and running, its time to set up online advertising.  My boss and the Mr. Kim, the advertising guy, are both very interested in seeing what we can do with this online space in the money-making department.  This is actually related to the front page links because with such a large header on the web site, where can we put ads?  Some reorganization might be in order.  I’d like to put Google Ads near the bottom of the articles, actually, next to the comment section. I think they would catch the most attention there.  I’ve looked into displaying ads on a Drupal site, and there seems to be a lot of OpenX integration. I’ll have to look into that after I get the links sorted out.

3.  Put up previous issues - This is turning into a more difficult assignment than I first thought.  While I do have the database of the old site, and I have managed to install and successfully use Node_Import to import a CSV file containing all the past web site data, two things continue to elude me.  First, the ProsePoint customizations put the subhead and the published date in a different kind of field, so I am unable to import them.  That gives me 2,900 articles all published on the day I did the import with no subheadlines, which is not an easy spot to work from.  I’m going to have to work very closely with the ProsePoint developer to see about getting this done.

 4.  Register with google news, reuters, etc etc. - After some consideration I think I’d better hold off on trying to register our web site as a legitimate news source until after we have our archives up.  That makes us look a little more respectable.  And, of course, before registering with Google I’m going to have to set up a News Sitemap.  I think it’s possible with the XML Sitemap module for Drupal, however that is still in development so I would have to do some tweaking on my own I think.

Perhaps I’m being too over the top.  Anyways, the article says wireless electricity is here, and that devices can be powered by being within an electromagnetic field.  From the article:

Some of the most visually arresting examples of wireless electricity are based on what’s known as radio frequency, or RF. While less efficient, they work across distances of up to 85 feet. In these systems, electricity is transformed into radio waves, which are transmitted across a room, then received by so-called power harvesters and translated back into low-voltage direct current. Imagine smoke detectors or clocks that never need their batteries replaced.

Taking that one step further, imagine active RFID chips that never have to be replaced.  One of the big limitations on RFID chips, the building blocks of the ubiquitous future we always hear about, is that only very little information can be stored on a passive RFID chip.  Active RFIDs, which need a power source, can act like little computers and store tons of information (relatively speaking).  But the power source drives the price up considerably.  With wireless electricity one could develop RFID chips with the low price of passive models and the high data storage of active models.

Additionally, ubiquitous power hanging around ambiently in the air goes right along with the ubiquitous computing we keep hearing so much about.  I should do some research to see if someone is already looking into this.

Minerva, a popular poster at Daum’s Agora, had recently become famous on the Internet for predicting the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and the steady fall of the won against the dollar.  The Economist ran a story about him last month.  His identity was a mystery, his predictions were correct, and he apparently earned the nickname ”Internet Economic President.”  The Hankyoreh summarizes his rise to fame pretty succinctly:

Minerva quickly became famous for his sharp comments on the government’s ill-fated economic policies and the media’s incorrect news reports by using layman’s terms and statistics to make his predictions. His Web posts got tens of thousands of hits and were copied to countless Internet bulletin boards and blogs. Internet users often described Minerva’s posts as an essential reference for discussing economic issues. An Internet community site at Daum is now selling a book that is a compilation of his writings.

This article in Korean summarizes why he was arrested.  A bilingual commenter at The Marmot’s Hole was kind enough to summarize it in English:

Basic summary: Minerva accused government of ordering the 7 major financial institutions to stop buying dollars, which caused major disruption in market; govt responded within 1 hr denying the accusation; minerva then responded immediately saying government is lying, why would they lie so brazenly when anybody can check with a couple phone calls. Few hrs later it became clear minerva was the one lying; minvera apologizes profusely and deletes his comments on daum agora.

This comes as a surprise to me and many Korean people as well, because it seems like a ridiculous overreaction from a democratic government, harking back to the days when Korea was a military dictatorship.  Also, the Internet seems to be the number one venue for spreading misinformation, and while it is mildly annoying and requires some critical thinking skills to cope with, I didn’t know it was illegal in this country.

Here‘s a list of the technical requirements, for those who are interested.  The only qualification that our new web site doesn’t pass is under Article URLs:

Technical Requirements: Article URLs

In order to be included in Google News, your articles URLs should meet the following guidelines:

Be unique. Each of your pages that display an article’s full text needs to have a unique URL. We can’t include sites in Google News that display multiple articles under one URL, or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

Be permanent. Our system is unable to crawl sites that use a single URL for multiple articles. For example, we wouldn’t be able to crawl the page www.yoursite.com/news1.html if it displayed a different story every day. In order to ensure that our links to articles function properly, each article on a news site needs to be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can’t be recycled).

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can’t crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.

The URLs on www.koreaittimes.com are automatically-generated aliases that consist of most of the words of a story title.  For instance, in the December story A Wave Too High? by Chun Go-eun, you may notice that the URL follows the format of web site name, then the word story, then the article URL which is wave-too-high.  This is really convenient for our users I think because it’s easy to remember, and it looks nice too.  However, it doesn’t contain a three digit number, so it doesn’t qualify as an article by Google’s guidelines.  I am going to have to think of a solution to this next week.

One thing I have been pondering is to put the node ID of each node into the story URL.  It could look something like www.koreaittimes.com/story/5534/this-story.  However, that would turn the human-friendly URLs into something that is impossible for casual readers to remember, with that 3 or 4 digit number in the middle.  I’m not sure how to resolve this yet, but I do think we need the traffic that Google News can generate.  I’ll have to think of something.

You can see the main bulk of the interview in this month’s issue, but the focus of the conversation drifted away from IT related things near the end of the interview, which was still interesting, of course.  Perhaps even more so.   We talked for a bit about the global financial crisis and what its impact will likely be in 2009.  The ambassador brought up something that I had not yet considered or read about, which is that even though the financial crisis has made a lot of jobs close and a lot of people lose investments, stocks, and homes, the agricultural output for 2008 was higher than normal.  He said in India it was about 4% greater than the previous year.  So while the financial crisis does have some problems, at least the world still has more food to eat than it did in previous years.

He also pointed out that India is relatively immune to the financial crisis, since it is pretty much a closed financial system.  In contrast to Korea, most of India’s production goes into the domestic market, and foreign investment is only 4% of total investment in the country.  This means that despite the problems the outside world is going through, India’s economy is almost the same as always.  He says that the country expects 7% growth next year, when most of the world is worried about a recession.

Look in this month’s issue of the print magazine for the full country report about India with more detail about that sort of financial thing.  Ambassador Tayal armed me well with a hefty amount of figures and statistics.

But there is one thing we could talk about, which is something that Chun Go-eun, the managing editor, was complaining about today.  It is the peculiar way in which Koreans mangle their own language when writing news.  Apparently there is normal Korean, which people use in their day to day lives, and then there is newspaper Korean, which is almost unintelligible.  According to Clair (Go-eun), “You see, this Korean media writing style thing, this is not Korean. it’s some… undefined language.”  The entire thing is written in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, but there are Hangul references to Chinese words sprinkled throughout each article.  This makes many articles, especially technical articles with specialized terms, actually Chinese language lessons for the average Korean reader.

If you are a reader of English-language Korean press, you might have seen something similar in the way that many Korean writers use English language acronyms.  They have a habit of just throwing acronyms into the text without explaining what they stand for or where they came from, and just running with them.  Unfortunately most acronyms in English have multiple meanings depending on context and subject matter, a nuance that seems to escape many English-language Korean reporters.