love this idea: "One person a day wins a chance to write to the growing list of subscribers. It could be you."

Thinking I should use this for all of my online communications.

Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in science fictionLojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters.

Lojban has a number of features which make it unique:

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

The Kinected Conference by MIT Media Lab uses all kinds of tricks to help improve people's focus and discussions through video conferencing. For instance, if you are faced with a few people around a table on the screen, the Kinect can pick up which person is talking and blur the other faces out, keeping focus on the speaker (demonstrated above). It also times how long someone has been speaking (useful for timed presentations), freeze frame if you want to do something else but make it look like you are listening, and use augmented reality for making projects.

It's done by using C++ software and openFrameworks library, plus two networked locations with video screens, the Kinect, calibrated microphones, and a lot of algorithms (see the map plan). Check out the video below and convince yourself that you don't wish you could use this at work.

A rare photo, released by the White House, shows Barack Obama fielding calls from a tent in Brazil, to keep up with events in Libya. The tent is a mobile secure area known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, designed to allow officials to have top secret discussions on the move.

They are one of the safest places in the world to have a conversation.

Designed to withstand eavesdropping, phone tapping and computer hacking, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities - also known as SCIFs - are protected areas where classified conversations can be held.

Stumbled upon this kind-of-great glossary totally randomly in a google search for the definition of 'production values':

"Computer-mediated communications, being a field based on modern computer technology, is one laden with obscure technical terms and arcane jargon. This glossary is provided in an attempt to define some of the more commonly used terms and concepts. Please note that most words are described in very general terms for brevity, and special cases and exceptions are largely omitted. Acronyms are pronounced as individual letters unless otherwise indicated. Some of these terms are also trademarks (proprietary intellectual property) of large us computer firms, though the words may be in common usage.

For much more complete, and thus much more precise, definitions of these and other computer-related concepts I refer you to The Jargon File. (Raymond, 1996.) In addition to technical accuracy this comprehensive dictionary of computer-related slang also provides a wealth of entertaining historical background to - and fascinating insight into - the mysterious world of computer nerd culture."

Custom software recreates various Sol LeWitt drawings. The software also posts instructions on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Human workers execute the drawings online based on the instructions from the program. The workers are paid 5¢ for each drawing. The software then assembles the drawings in a grid. The computer generated drawings, and the grids filled in by anonymous workers are displayed side by side.

Oil paintings ordered over the internet, inkjet on paper, 18 feet by 8 feet

Almost two thirds of the world’s oil paintings are produced cheaply in China and a large number of these are sold over the internet, raising questions of reproduction, authorship and copyright. These commissioned paintings represent a variety of experiments; painted feedback loops, open-ended instructional paintings, and paintings corrupted by digital transmission errors. They investigate the system in which these paintings are created, and more importantly directly address some of the individual painters’ aesthetics and ideas. This series of commissioned paintings blurs the boundaries between human creativity and machine-like, systematic intelligence.

Like the telephone game for drawing.

"Noam Galai took a few photos of himself in 2006 and uploaded them to his Flickr. A few people liked those photos, but he didn't think of it. Over time, he began to see his photos popping up all over magazines, the internet and as street art. Then it began appearing on commodities (clothes, books, etc.). Now, it's being used as a symbol of protest in Iran. The crazy part is that nobody asked his permission.

Fstoppers are responsible for this great video narrative, titled The Stolen Scream, which details Galai's story, and the process of watching himself become an anonymous global icon with no control over how his image is used (in one case, the photo was attributed to someone else entirely). He even mentions that when he tried to register the photo with sites like Getty Images, they told him the image would never sell.

All in all though, it's a great story about the dissemination of digital media over the Internet and the inevitable conflict between those who create it and those who use it"

The problem with writing a biography of Socrates, as Bettany Hughes merrily admits, is that he’s a “doughnut subject”: a rich and tasty topic with a big hole right in the middle where the main character should be. Despite his fame and his insistence on an examined life, Socrates never wrote anything, and our knowledge of him comes mainly from three contemporaries — his devoted pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the parodist Aristophanes — each of whom had his own agenda. He produced no great answers, only great questions, and the most enduring image we have of his life is his leaving of it, as the title of this book suggests.