TIA….This Is Africa…
Tomorrow, Saturday 26th July, I will return to South Africa on a business trip for two weeks. It’s always exciting when traveling to new places and this is no different. This time I will be going to Johannesburg and Pretoria and maybe even Durban. The trip is all about introducing sustainability in the construction sector and a host of other things, to the South African market.
I will try my best to post some updates during the trip…wish me luck…
Comments(1)The Tipping Point
I have been watching the recent news out of the UK with some attention. Two issues strikes me as having Tipped:
1. Knife Crime
2. Obsession with Robert Mugabe
It’s obvious both reached their Tipping Point and somehow very recently. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell documents three essential reasons for these phenomenon: The Law of the Few; the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context. What’s happening in the UK seems to have striking resemblances to what was happening in the New York subways in the 1980’s and 1990’s and which Gladwell documents extremely well. (more…)
Social Net Works?
Over the past months, I have resisted getting involved in Social Networks like Facebook, HI5 and the rest. Some of the solicitations are just so way out, but you can always refuse them eh…To be honest, I don’t seem to have the time to keep up to date…keeping this blog up to date is hard enough…
Anyway, I was recently contacted by some long lost friends (and family) through Facebook, which made me think there must be something there after all…
Spoken Text…How Cool Is This…
Last November, 2007, my company launched an initiative, Sustainable Construction, and I was so proud with the way everything turned out. The book and the website looked great. Then I presented it to someone with visual difficulties. This is not to say that the person was blind, they just had difficulties reading the small letters on websites. When designers want something to look sexy, they don’t really care about people with seeing difficulties, and font size of 8, or 10, may look good, but is not easily readable for people with a visual problem.
So, I did some research and found, among others, Spoken Text.Net, and I really couldn’t believe the voice reproduction quality. Listen to this text buy clicking the MP3 Icon at the end of this article. I think it’s great.
I think Spoken Text.net will have to resolve their business model, as making the recordings available for just 7 days doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless, it’s a great platform, which I will try to see how I can support and utilise in the future.
I did wonder if a similar platform for sign language was being worked on somewhere in the world? I asked about this in Portugal, but nothing going on here.
