QR_Codes – B12 Solipsism

A few interesting links collected July 15th through July 19th:

This isn’t the first time Seed has sacrificed editorial independence | Gaia Vince | Science | guardian.co.uk – after sending Seed requests for payment, I received an email from my editor asking for more columns and explaining that they wouldn’t be publishing the Bhopal piece because it was critical of Dow Chemical, which now owns the company that caused the gas leak in 1984, and that Seed was seeking an advertising contract with Dow.
A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem : A Blog Around The Clock – Blogging on Huffington Post is an instant loss of credibility – a day of a Pepsi blog is nothing compared to years of pseudoscience, medical quackery, Creationism and Deepak Chopra’s posts there. Nobody in their right mind would want to be associated with such a cesspit of anti-science
Sanitation Trucks To Carry More Than Garbage: They’ll Carry A QR Message – Starting Monday, both sides of 2,200 city Sanitation trucks will feature QR (quick response) code panels your smartphone can use to access “The Green Apple: Recycling,”

A new way to take a tour of Chicago’s architectural marvels using a 2-D barcode and smart phones. Sounds very cool, I’ll let you know how it works.

A new walking tour will let you download the history of great Chicago buildings on a web-enabled cell phone.

The tour promises to give you a quick and easy way to access loads of information about ten early Chicago skyscrapers, among them Louis Sullivan’s former Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store (now the Sullivan Center) at the corner of State and Madison Streets, Holabird & Roche’s Marquette Building at 141 S. Dearborn St., and D.H. Burnham & Co.’s Railway Exchange Building (now the Santa Fe Building) at 80 E. Jackson Blvd.

The tour has been put together by the Chicago-based Society for Architectural Historians and it’s expected to be up and running by Saturday, April 17.

“We don’t get a penny. It’s a public service,” said Pauline Saliga, executive director of the society, which is holding its annual convention in Chicago from April 21 to 25.

The tour uses a barcode technology called the Microsoft tag. Each tag is a small icon. The SAH is posting tags on signs in the lobbies of ten early Loop skyscrapers. (An example, from the former Carson Pirie Scott store, is above.)

To get the tour info, which is free, you download the free Microsoft application for your web-enabled cell phone (say, an iPhone or a BlackBerry) at: http://gettag.mobi. Then, open the application on your phone and, with the application still open, use your phone to photograph the tag on one of the lobby signs. Presto! A photo of the building and its history is supposed to appear.

“The Sky’s the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers” (Rizzoli International Publications)

The text comes from the authoritative 1990 book, “The Sky’s The Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers.” Saliga was its editor.

[Click to continue reading Cityscapes: Point, shoot and learn–new system lets you download tour information about great Chicago skyscrapers ]

Other than using the proprietary Microsoft tag instead of the open-source QR code, this is an awesome idea, and hope it spreads to more areas, and even other cities

Tag: QR_Codes

Reading Around on July 15th through July 19th

Twenty-first Century Style Architectural Tour

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