Headphones are part of daily life at train stations, an urban necessity used by commuters to drown out the flurry of action around them. But the other night at Union Station in Los Angeles, as I watched a woman crawl across the top of an information booth while a man’s voice from another room whispered in my ear, the headphones I wore became a way to enhance, not ignore, the experience—like tuning into a pirate radio broadcast where the plot began to come to life before my eyes.
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It would appear that, as a country, we’re experiencing some serious regret (or relief?) in examining plans for our cities that never came to fruition. San Francisco looked at its Unbuilt SF
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Like many major metropolises, Los Angeles has an international reputation, but the preconceived notions that surround the southern California hub seem to be consistently skewed. Sure, the weather’s nice—but it’s vapid, and too sprawling, and you need a car, and what about the traffic, and where’s the culture??
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Just a week after it began the first phase of putting iPads in the hands of all 640,000 students in the region, the Los Angeles school district already has a fight on its hands. In a matter of days, 300 children at Theodore Roosevelt High School managed to work around protective measures placed on the Apple tablets, giving them complete access to features — including Facebook, Twitter and other apps — that should otherwise have been blocked.
Students bypassed the security lock on the device by deleting a personal profile preloaded in the settings — a simple trick that has the school district police chief recommending the board limit the $1 billion rollout (including hardware and other related expenses) before it turns into a “runaway train scenario.” For now, officials have banned home use of the iPads while they assess ways to better restrict access — they would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
[Original image credit: flickingerbrad, Flickr]
Via: Fox News
Source: LA Times
Philanthropist Eli Broad seems to have his hands or his money in nearly every art museum in Los Angeles. Now his very own museum, The Broad, is nearing completion in downtown Los Angeles, right next door to Disney Concert Hall (which he also helped build, of course). Architect Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro hosted a preview of the building this week, including the first look at the 2,500 cast-concrete panels that make up the lacy facade.
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New York Times tech writer Eilene Zimmerman did not come to Los Angeles to make friends, you guys. In her story and blog post about L.A.’s startup culture, Zimmerman manages to cram as many tired stereotypes as she can into a single sentence: "As a city, Los Angeles has been better known more for sprawl, gang violence and Botox than its tech start-up scene." Her point (and she does have one): L.A. has, like, too much traffic to have a real tech scene or anything, but, gosh darn it, these folks are trying!
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As mind-blowing as science is these days, it’s probably safe to say that we’re not going to invent a time machine within the next century. Through the magic of code, though, there is an entertaining alternative in the world of interactive maps. Obviously, The Smithsonian is on it
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For every existent building in your city, there are a dozen that never came to be. Some plans were abandoned for good reasons (see: LA’s 5,000-foot skyscraper), others were abandoned because of legal and financial quandaries. Either way, these forgotten drawings show us what we could’ve had.
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Los Angeles flaunts its celebrity and pumps its cleavage and yogas its fitness and bikinis its summer and juices its vapidity and sells its dream better than any city in the world. We’ve seen beautiful time lapses
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Despite the fact that it’s currently banned in Los Angeles, UberX is defiantly still up and running. I used it for the first time this weekend. This so-called ride-sharing service from San Francisco-based Uber Technologies is supposedly the future of cabs. Much like similar services Lyft and Sidecar, UberX seeks to "disrupt" the taxi industry by using average people with a car (and without a taxi license) to shuttle others around. But it’s pretty clear that they shouldn’t be allowed to.
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