bloo street

丽江古城

WALL.E tells you to smile. 

nevver:

Cats v. Dogs

(via ilovecharts)

reuters:

Baboons climb on a Hyundai i30 hatchback at Knowsley Safari Park during a promotional event by the manufacturer to test the car’s durability, in Preston, Merseyside May 1, 2012. REUTERS/M&C Saatchi/handout

PHOTOS: The best images over the past 24 hours

latimes:

Some movie experiences have unexpected endings: Attending a 75-week movie-screening series was a solo experience for a shy former punk rocker. But close proximity to another movie fan slowly built to a dramatic finish.

(My favorite L.A. affairs column so far. —S.)

Illustration credit: David Gothard / For The Times

theatlantic:

Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of ‘Expert’

Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the hope that through its openness and its anonymity it could democratize the process of how knowledge gets built and organized. Last year The Awl published an essay “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert,” in which Maria Bustillos argued, “Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of ‘authority,’ ‘authorship,’ and even ‘knowledge.’ ” Online, the crowd was knocking the individual off its throne as the arbiter of information. As Bustillos quoted Clay Shirky, “On Wikipedia ‘the author’ is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking.”

But, of course, this kind of collaboration doesn’t itself imply the absence of expertise. Experts can, after all, collaborate together. And Wikipedia certainly benefits from academics with specialized knowledge developing and patrolling articles they care about. (This is particularly true when measured in terms of Wikipedia’s breadth — it’s hard to imagine many of the extremely technical scientific articles existing at all without the input of scientists who made it their business to fill out the encyclopedia’s periphery.)

So “experts” in the traditional sense (e.g. academic pedigrees) do still matter in this collaborative environment. But a new study from researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo Research points to a complementary phenomenon: The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing. They search for expertise in Wikipedia’s pages, and they find it, but what they’re looking for — what they call expertise — uses different signals to project itself. Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online.

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

theatlantic:

In Focus; Portraits of Greece in Crisis

Top: Dimitris Stamatakos, 36, sits in a field on land he is renting near his home in the village of Krokeae in the Peloponesse area of Greece, on March 18. Before the crisis Stamatakos was able to make a living by selling olives that he farmed on the land he owns, now he is forced to work for neighboring farms and do odd jobs to earn his living.

Center-left: Afghan immigrants jump from an abandoned rail car to catch the train for Athens in Orestiada, on April 9. Human rights groups have heavily criticized Greece over the the building of a six-mile-long fence topped with razor wire, and for plans to intern illegal immigrants in former military bases pending deportation. The debt-crippled country is the European Union’s main entry point for illegal immigrants, mostly from Asia and Africa.

Center-right: Protesters run from police after hurling petrol bombs during violent anti-austerity demonstration in central Athens, on February 12. Historic cinemas, cafes and shops went up in flames in central Athens as black-masked protesters fought Greek police outside parliament, while inside lawmakers endorsed a new EU/IMF austerity deal.

Bottom: Passers-by cast shadows on pavement near a pool of blood following an attack on a policeman by protesters in Athens’ main Syntagma Square, on April 7. A protest march that followed a memorial service for Dimitris Christoulas turned violent with marchers beating a policeman and stealing his uniform, bulletproof vest, handcuffs and radio.

See more. [Images: Reuters, AFP/Getty, AP]

(via huffingtonpost)