07 MAR 2015 by ideonexus

 How Los Angeles Regulates Air Pollution

Los Angeles is not really a city of skyscrapers. All around those skyscrapers is a flat expanse of one- and two-story buildings. This low-density urban development means you have to drive to get around in LA. Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning.Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning. Its public transportation has not been developed or utilized to its fullest potential. This has caused an inevitable increase in car o...
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Despite increased traffic.

08 JAN 2013 by ideonexus

 Trivia VS Knowledge

Have you ever met anyone with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock bands? I knew a group of people in Los Angeles who spent their time browsing the used bins at record shops back in the days when music was recorded on vinyl (which is making a comeback these days, even though most kids have never heard anything other than compressed 128-kilobite-per-second digital recordings). Some of these people were so obsessed with obscure bands that they deserved the moniker "vinyl vermin." They coll...
Folksonomies: theory hypothesis trivia
Folksonomies: theory hypothesis trivia
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Graffin relates the story of "Vinyl Vermin" who collected trivia about music rather than cultivating opinions on what was good or bad. He relates this to amassing taxonomy knowledge without a theory.

02 NOV 2012 by ideonexus

 Disneyland's Simulation Reinforces the Myth of the Real

Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But...
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It's fantasy persuades us to ignore the simulation of what we consider the "real" world. It presents itself as childish whimsy, which convinces us that what we experience daily is the "adult" world.

22 MAR 2012 by ideonexus

 Los Angeles's Air Quality Regulations

Los Angeles air quality has improved in recent years because of new regulations on automobile and plant emissions, but the American Lung Association still ranks the Los Angeles area as the metropolitan region in America most polluted by year-round particles, short-term particles, and ozone. This persistent ranking contrasts with other data on Los Angeles's environmental progress. For example, the number of "exceedance" days in the Los Angeles / Long Beach area of southern California (days tha...
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California requests additional federal regulations because its cities have unhealthy levels of ozone, which are poisoning its citizens.

03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 If Humans Were Like Chimpanzees

If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still Dok fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and belligerent, which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very dif...
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Much would be the same, but we would be very different sexually.