James Surowiecki has been following the business and marketing fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal on the New Yorker site. Contrary to the predictions of some experts that Tiger’s sponsors would stand by him, he has been dropped by Accenture and “downscaled” by Tag Heuer in the past week.

John Cassidy’s take, also on the New Yorker site, posits a failure in crisis management.

This Bill Simmons piece from a few weeks back is one of the more entertaining things I’ve read on the scandal.

This report by Roger Bohn and James Short at UCSD documents their effort to measure how much information Americans consume, representing a revival and recasting of UC Berkeley’s “How Much Information?” project early in this decade.  The report estimates that Americans consume 34GB per person per day, and 100,000 words.

The report raises some interesting questions and issues. On his blog, Roger Bohn answers several critics who argue that the measures of information consumption aren’t really meaningful. For example, if you look at high-res and low-res versions of the same image for ten seconds, does the difference in bytes between the two images multiplied by ten really represent the difference in information consumed?

The methodology and results should spark some valuable discussion. It would also be nice if this effort could be sustained through regular updates in order to refine the approach and track changes over time. I thought that the Berkeley reports, which focused on data created and stored, were useful as well. The most recent effort I know of to track those trends is this IDC white paper from a few years back.

Went to Paris last week. Had a great time. We had some issues on our museum visits due to strikes and other job actions, but in general were able to see everything we wanted to see.

My review of the Hotel Relais Bosquet is here. My review of Tribeca on Rue Cler is here.

I like how they use “Fanfare for the Common Man” for the music.

Interesting article from the Japan Times about nyotaimori, the practice of eating sushi off of a (nearly) naked woman’s body. An over-the-top indulgence of the yakuza transformed into an emblematic example of Japanese exoticism by foreign journalists needing a good story.

Via Boing Boing. One example is this newsreel about the Hindenburg.

Somali pirates have established a stock exchange to finance hijackings, reports the Financial Post, via AL Daily.

I was wondering why I’ve been getting many more email invitations to conferences lately. This blog post on the Scientist site explains why.

The Chicago Tribune travel section carries an interesting piece about visiting the places near Tokyo that were major targets of the American invasion of Honshu planned for 1945 or 1946.

Visiting (and photographing) haikyo, the abandoned remains of buildings and towns, seems to be a fairly popular pastime in Japan. A number of books and blogs by Japanese and non-Japanese are devoted to the hobby.

Here’s an interesting set of photos on the blog Mike’s Blender, taken at the abandoned Mount Asama Volcano Museum. Asama is an active volcano (last eruption in February 2009, video here). It is located in Nagano Prefecture, about 90 miles northwest of Tokyo.

Since discovering some of the leading blogs that document haikyo visits, such as this one, I’ve wondered why these sorts of sites are left for people to wander through in Japan. My impression is that similar sites in the United States are rare, particularly in urban areas, and those that do exist are mainly locked up. My guess is that differences in legal liability for property owners is the cause. Anyone wandering into an open, abandoned building in the United States who hurt themselves could probably sue the owner. But if the owner takes affirmative steps to lock up the building and deny access, someone who enters and hurts themselves is guilty of breaking and entering. Perhaps in Japan owners do not have this liability to the same extent.

Alot of the haikyo photography, including these shots of the Volcano Museum, has a certain poignant beauty to it.