Tim Burton Retrospective A retrospective of Tim Burton, last year's Cannes jury president, comes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The show allows Tim's work to be seen in the broadest context of creative activity," says curator Britt Salvesen.
Updated Fri May 20, 2011
Midnight in Paris Less than a week after Thor opens, Hiddleston will make another debut -- this time as a character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, opener of the 64th Cannes Film Festival.
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
Google I/O O'Reilly will join 5,500 techies at Google I/O to talk web development and hear Google product announcements, like Google Wave in 2009 and Google TV in 2010. TUE, MAY 10
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
National Association of Recording Merchandisers convention Fitness makes me a better leader," says Napster general manager Christopher Allen, who will pedal his way through the holiday after the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) convention. "Anyone who's anyone in music retail is there."
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
Thor What else is on Melton's calendar? "Watching and laughing at Thor." Of his portrayal of villainous Loki, actor Tom Hiddleston has said, "I'm proud to say that I am continuing a long tradition of British baddies." FRI, MAY 06
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
Fashion140 Conference Red Magnet Media's Rachel Masters, who leads a workshop at NARM, is also headed to a Duran Duran concert -- "my favorite band in the world" -- and the Fashion140 Conference, centered on social media and fashion.
Updated Tue May 3, 2011
Maker Faire "I'll definitely go to the Burton exhibit," says Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder. He'll also be at Maker Faire, a DIY celebration. "Our food demos run the gamut" from tofu to seedballs to fermentation, says organizer Kim Dow.
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2011 This year's OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2011 comes 10 years after the virtual learning portal launched. Web 2.0 advocate Tim O'Reilly says of his speaking gig, "It's what I do: help make connections."
Updated Tue May 3, 2011
RailsConf 2011 Six days later, O'Reilly Media is holding RailsConf for open-source aficionados. "I'll be talking about building a geek army of coders and designers to make governments more transparent," says speaker Dan Melton of Code for America.
Updated Tue May 3, 2011
Manhattan Cocktail Classic One of Be Your Own Best Publicist's coauthors, Meryl Weinsaft Cooper, will represent New Amsterdam Gin at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, where alcohol-brand reps and cocktail connoisseurs will clink, drink, and network.
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
Bike to Work Day Another highlight on Dow's May calendar is Bike to Work Day. "Getting out of the car and on two wheels feels like freedom," she says. "It's damn fun!" Fewer than 1% of adults bike to work.
Posted Tue May 3, 2011
25th Annual WonderCon It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a -- scrolling, scrolling ... Comics
may have made the leap from printed page to silver screen (the
Spider-Man trilogy alone has nabbed $2.5 billion at the box office), but
the move from paper to mobile devices has been laden with Kryptonite.
Fans at this San Francisco geek fest will assess digital comics' $1
million piece of the $680 million U.S. comics industry. Zooming and
panning on the iPad still "yank you out of the experience a little more
than they should," says comics writer and critic Scott McCloud.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
MLB Opening Day The real world's baseball season starts today, which also means batters up for another stat-fueled year of the fantasy version. At 30 million players strong, fantasy sports is a $4 billion industry, drawing in companies from ESPN and Yahoo, which host leagues, to Bloomberg, which has partnered with mlb.com to offer a fantasy-sports take on its financial services.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
Government Security Expo Law-enforcement officials are trained to fight crime in the physical world. Still, the need to transition them from guns and patrol cars to keyboards and mouses is pressing. "How can they protect the public when more and more threats are coming from cyberspace?" asks GovSec content director Wyatt Kash, citing recent WikiLeaks-related hacker strikes on visa.com and mastercard.com, which were shuttered for several hours in December.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
National Volunteer Week Gym reimbursements and lavish company parties may be going the way of
the dinosaur, but paid time for volunteering is one employee perk not
yet in danger of extinction. Take UnitedHealthcare, whose company
attorneys recently donated 600 hours of pro bono legal service. Or
Target, whose workers spend 450,000 hours annually on projects such as
overhauling school libraries. At Gap, staffers can spend five company
hours each month on causes like teaching underserved youth about job
applications.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
World Health Day We bet you can't guess the theme of this year's World Health Day. And
no, that line wasn't laced with sarcasm -- really, we bet you can't.
After presumably running down the list of big-name global health issues
like malaria, AIDS, obesity, and childhood mortality, the World Health
Organization settled on a 2011 theme that is as scientifically important
as it is difficult to remember: antimicrobial resistance. It's the idea
that the biggest health threat is the resistance that human bodies are
building up to medicines aimed at fighting health threats.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
Google Global Science Fair What do earmuffs, television, and ChatRoulette have in common? They
were all dreamed up by teenagers -- the same age group Google is
targeting with its first-ever science fair, an online smarts search.
Judging begins today, with winners announced in mid-July. Those who
missed the deadline (or the 13-to-18 age bracket) can still marvel at
wunderkinds' submitted videos and vote on which pint-size inventor might
have outsize impact.
Updated Mon Mar 28, 2011
Sister Act: A Divine Musical Comedy Sister Act fans rejoice! It's been nearly 20 years since the
wacky tale of a lounge singer turned phony nun became a classic, but now
it's being resurrected for Broadway. Silver-screen success doesn't
always mean quality theater (we're looking at you, Legally Blonde), but with music by Grammy and Oscar winner Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin)
and a box-office record-breaking run in London, failure seems unlikely.
"It's not about how good the movie is," says Bill Taylor, one of the
show's producers. "It's about how good the show is.
Posted Wed Mar 23, 2011
Where 2.0 In the battle to be mayor at your coffee outpost, it's easy to
overlook the stat that only 1% of smartphone owners use location-based
apps more than once a week. To nudge more folks into joining the
geo-craze, TripAdvisor and Groupon are adapting data from Facebook
Places and Foursquare to make their recommendations more real-time and
relevant, based on where you are and what your friends most recently
liked. "People have all this location knowledge they're waiting to
release and share," says Laurel Ruma, cochair of this Santa Clara
conference.
Posted Wed Mar 23, 2011
Include 2011 Bill Moggridge, cofounder of Ideo and director of Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum, has a suggestion for anyone designing a phone:
"Put on a thick pair of gloves and try to operate the cell phone. If you
can successfully do it with that thick pair of gloves on, it's probably
going to work for the person whose hands don't work quite so well."
Empathy isn't an obvious job requirement for a designer, but it will be
at the heart of this biannual conference of universal-design advocates
in London.
Posted Wed Mar 23, 2011
