Adi Robertson:

Architects in Amsterdam have begun construction on what they’re calling the first full-sized 3D-printed house. Using what’s essentially a large-scale version of a desktop 3D printer, Dus Architects is building what will eventually be a 13-room Dutch canal house made of interlocking plastic parts. The project was announced earlier this year — part proof of concept, part art project. After about three weeks of work, The Guardian reports, one three-meter-high corner segment has been produced. The interior and facade are printed as part of the same brick, and spaces are left for wiring and pipes; for now, the walls are later filled with concrete for insulation and reinforcement. The entire process of printing and assembling the house is slated to take three years.
 
 The 3D Print Canal House, as it’s called, is conceived as an improvement to current architectural practice on several levels. Designers at Dus say that by printing series of blocks instead of building with conventional materials, they can eliminate waste and reduce transportation costs; the plastic itself can be made with recycled materials. Individual rooms and design elements could be remixed and reordered by non-architects, allowing people to design their own ideal home and then hire a printing contractor to build it. And the rooms themselves can “fairly easy be disconnected” to move the house. The pieces are made with an oversized printer called the KamerMaker (or “room builder”), designed specially for Dus. The site itself is open to tourists, who can visit on most weekdays; President Barack Obama paid a visit earlier this month.

Flowing Data:

The Centennia Historical Atlas is a program that shows you border changes in Europe and the Middle East, from the 11th century to the present. It’s meant as an educational tool. The video below is the animated map from the program set to climactic music from the movie Inception.

BBC:

Google plans to launch its automated cars on the roads by 2017. The project has been a personal obsession for 18 years, he told the Ted audience.
 
 “It started when I was at college in Michigan. I was waiting for the bus and it was cold and snowing,” he said.
 
 He believes that automated cars can help save lives – currently 20 million people are injured each ear in car accidents and in the US crashes are the biggest cause of death for the under 35s.
 
 He finished the interview with a call to firms to embrace new technologies.
 
 “Most businesses fail because they miss the future,” he said.

via Tabdump.

Kirsten Reach:

In the middle of a cold, dark week, is there any greater gift than a new interview with Andrew Wylie? The man is tougher, more concise, and more quotable than anyone else in the industry.
 
 Last October, Andrew Wylie gave an interview to Laura Bennett in The New Republic. He said that the industry was acting like Procter and Gamble when “it’s Hermès.”
 
 But his harshest lines were reserved for Amazon Publishing. He tried a Kindle in the back of a cab in Rome, couldn’t read it in the dim light, and thought, “fuck this.” He compared Amazon to Napoleon, diagnosing the company with a case of greed and megalomania.

Dimiter Kenarov:

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — On the eve of the Crimean referendum, while the world anxiously awaited the climax of Ukraine’s political drama, I went to Simferopol’s Crimea Russian Drama Theater to see a production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector. In spite of the tension in the city, in spite of the insolent men in military fatigues patrolling every street and intersection, the house was still half-full that Saturday evening, with families, couples, and groups of high-school students occupying the plush seats under a gorgeous, blue-edged, floral-and-butterfly-themed ceiling.
 
 The plot of The Government Inspector is classic bitter Russian satire: A new arrival in a provincial, corrupt town — an imperious young man named Khlestakov — is mistaken by local officials for an important government inspector from St. Petersburg, sent incognito to examine the town’s affairs. The terrified mayor and his cronies immediately grovel before him, offering bribes and favors. The town merchants, believing Khlestakov a real inspector with the power to finally clean up their town, also court him. At the end of the play, the ruse is revealed, but too late: Having taken advantage of everyone, Khlestakov suddenly departs, never to be seen again. In the final act, the real government inspector arrives.

Caitlin Roper:

That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of Stanford and founded a company called Theranos with her tuition money. Last fall it finally introduced its radical blood-testing service in a Walgreens pharmacy near company head­quarters in Palo Alto, California. (The plan is to roll out testing centers nation­wide.) Instead of vials of blood—one for every test needed—Theranos requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood. With that they can perform hundreds of tests, from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses. The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods.
 
 The implications are mind-blowing. With inexpensive and easy access to the infor­mation running through their veins, people will have an unprecedented window on their own health. And a new generation of diagnostic tests could allow them to head off serious afflictions from cancer to diabetes to heart disease.

Kaya Genç:

The modernization of the Ottoman Empire began in 1839 when the state started adapting western ideas; following an almost century long struggle for constitutional rule, the shift culminated in the formation of a secular republic in 1923. It is possible to celebrate, or scrutinize, certain aspects of this process but one thing is certain: A novel about Turkey’s modernization process would not lack the kind of subject matter that led literary theorist Frederic Jameson to famously argue that “all third-world texts are necessarily … allegorical.” There is the ordinary individual coming from an ethnic and cultural background with long held religious beliefs, struggling to fit into the model of a new citizen molded for her by the state apparatus. There is the frustration of a new class of secular citizens pretending to act like Italian gentlemen or French ladies, despite coming from decisively non-European backgrounds. And last, but not least, there is the powerful centralized system of bureaucracy that awards the best imitators of European manners while punishing the less successful ones.
 
 Had The Time Regulation Institute, Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar’s magnum opus translated into English by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, only concerned itself with those societal effects of the process of late Ottoman and early republican modernization process it would still be a good book. But it is a great deal more than that. Although it is a deeply political book that undermines the very foundations on which the modernization project had been placed, The Time Regulation Institute is by no means a work of political propaganda or a shallow political allegory. It is one of the best comic novels of twentieth century in any language.

Evgeny Morozov
 :

Tech titans with better data and engineers will disrupt Wall Street, writes Evgeny Morozov
 
 In the past few decades, Wall Street has made finance a central feature of both the global economy and of our everyday lives – a process often described as “financialisation”. Silicon Valley, almost contemporaneously, has done the same for digital media technologies. That process, too, has a fancy name: “mediatisation”.
 With reports that Facebook is seeking to buy a drone-manufacturing company, ostensibly to connect the most remote corners of the globe, the days of blessed disconnection seem firmly behind us.

Reuters:

“This is another step toward reform, but we are still years away from having either the legislative capacity or market willingness to embrace a new mortgage finance system,” said Isaac Boltansky, a policy analyst with Compass Point Research and Trading.
 
 Under the proposal, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be wound down and replaced with a new government reinsurer called the Federal Mortgage Insurance Corporation, which would provide assistance only after private creditors had taken a hit. The entity would be financed by fees on lenders who want the government backstop.
 
 Included in the outline is a mandate that strong underwriting standards be built into the new system. It would also require a 5 percent down payment for all but first-time buyers, although that requirement would be phased in. Some consumer and housing advocates worry that a system with rigid down payments will prevent less affluent Americans from accessing credit even if a limited government role is retained

Saya Weissman:

Before there was Don Draper, there was David Ogilvy. “The father of advertising,” as he is sometimes referred to, was all about valuing the consumer’s intelligence, testing and “the big idea.” He helped forge a new, creative path for advertising in the ’60s that we now all look back on as the Golden Age of the advertising industry.
 
 Unsurprisingly, a lot of what Ogilvy had to say back then still applies to the industry today — and it is perhaps even more important to remember some of his soundbites now with technology and the pace of the digital world forcing advertisers to be faster, more agile and more creative in real time.
 
 Here are five David Ogilvyisms — shown as Don Draper macros, because why not? — that are still relevant today.