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The American Assembly has released their much-anticipated and well-presented study on Copy Culture. The random phone survey of 2303 Americans and 1000 Germans answers many questions about the demographics and public perception of file sharing and piracy. TorrentFreak pulls out some highlights.
posted by gilrain on Jan 15, 2013 - 17 comments

Edward Gorey's gothic tales from the vault: ' Edward Gorey's arch eccentrics are on display in two reissues and a never-before-published story.' [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns on Nov 1, 2012 - 14 comments

Section 1. In the event of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, the surviving members of the CUSFS shall be formed into a clan, henceforth referred to as 'the Clan.' The surviving members of the Board will reconvene under the new name of The Elders Who Remember The Time Before It Changed, henceforth referred to as 'the Elders.'

The Columbia University Science Fiction Society's Constitution and Bylaws. [more inside]
posted by pts on Sep 15, 2011 - 26 comments

M presents: The Master Theorem. Not that master theorem, this one is full of puzzles and games. Take a crack at this week's theorem, or start with a tutorial from the help page. Once you've solved your first theorem (and earned membership) check out the seals, a different, sometimes deeper style of puzzle. New theorems and seals are being added weekly. [more inside]
posted by Maastrictian on Mar 13, 2011 - 59 comments

"In many places the concentration [of convicted residents] is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks."

Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow for five of the nation’s cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today.

See the several linked pdfs.
posted by OmieWise on Dec 28, 2010 - 59 comments

The Downie/Schudson Report, as it's widely called, is cautiously optimistic that journalism will survive, but doesn't beat around the bush. It urges a number of fairly radical, controversial suggestions on how to reinvent the news media without killing "accountability journalism," that critical, dirt-digging, power-questioning but expensive journalism America is famous for.
posted by jason's_planet on Oct 29, 2009 - 27 comments

This is the full, 81 min (embedded small screen vid) speech given today at Columbia University by President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Columbia University President, Lee Bollinger sets the stage with some critical statements about the President of Iran.
posted by snsranch on Sep 24, 2007 - 194 comments

In a parallel universe Your Favorite Band Really Does Suck! Duncan Watts and others conducted a Web-based experiment [PDF] called Music Lab. Their findings: "while talent might distinguish good from bad, social pressure and pure dumb luck are also big influences on which bands gain the most fame." "Calling the [experiment] 'pathbreaking,' sociologist Michael Macy of Cornell University says the findings illustrate how a small advantage can snowball, making popularity hard to predict. Economist Robert Frank, also at Cornell, says the work shows 'we're all susceptible to the herd mentality.'" The effect of "cumulative advantage" has impact on the popularity of other aspects of contemporary culture: books, films, websites and more.
posted by ericb on Apr 21, 2007 - 42 comments

My lost city: Low Life author Luc Sante reminisces about a youth spent in the ruins of 1970s New York:

"... when I was a student at Columbia, my windows gave out onto the plaza of the School of International Affairs, where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates. Since then the city had lapsed even further ... if you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square."

Sante talked about the period a bit more in a 2004 interview with The Believer.
posted by ryanshepard on Feb 16, 2005 - 6 comments

Synthetic Trees could purify the air - "It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds," said the Columbia University physicist...synthetic trees could help clean up an atmosphere grown heavy with carbon dioxide..."You can be a thousand times better than a living tree...There are a number of engineering issues which need to be worked out," he said. (BBC) Hurry up, then - "Ice dams are blocking Latvian ports, winds and storms are battering Europe, Portugal is freezing, Vietnam has lost one-third its rice crop, and the cold has caused close to 2,000 deaths in usually temperate South Asia."
posted by troutfishing on Feb 23, 2003 - 18 comments

The warm water ocean currents of the Gulf Stream are why London rarely gets snow yet Boston is fridged despite London being as far north as Montreal, Canada. New weather modeling research from Columbia University may turn this long-held belief on its head; London can thank the Rocky Mountains for its mild winters. Good news for the rest of Europe too in case the Gulf Stream stops due to Arctic melting.
posted by stbalbach on Jan 30, 2003 - 22 comments