In this workshop designers, artists, programmers and electro-tinkerers develop ideas for new, simple genetic algorithms that produce image or sound or that fabricate objects. Genetic algorithms are computational techniques that mimic biological evolutionary processes. Applied in design fields, they can generate unpredictable form solutions and variability in answer to design goals.
After an artistic and technical introduction participants generate ideas in groups with mixed skills and develop their ideas in a guided process. The workshop will be introduced and coached by artist and engineer Luis Rodil-Fernández.

The workshop consists of three sessions spread over 6 weeks. The process will be documented in a blog on the Transnatural.org.

The aim is to develop work and documentation material that will be part of the exhibition Things That Mind Their Own Business at the Transnatural exhibition in may 2012 in the NEMO Science Center.

The workshop consists of 3 events that take place over a 6 week period. The entire process will be followed by a blog on www.transnatural.org

price: € 25 / half day, incl. lunch
duration ± 4 hours, 3 half days over a period of 6 weeks
dates: Sat. 17 Dec., Sat. 14 Jan., Sat. 28 Jan. 14.00h
Location: Transnatural workspace: Lijnbaansgracht 148hs. Amsterdam
Registration and questions via academy@transnatural.org

Deadline: Saturday 17th, December, 2011

WHO: International Artists
WHAT: 1-3 month residency
WHERE: APO33, Platforme Intermedia – Nantes, FRANCE
WHEN: Mid April – May or August – October 2012

APO33 a not-for-profit association/artists collective founded in 1997 in Nantes, France. APO33 research practices cross philosophy, poetry, visual, architecture, sonic arts and anything else that may arrive through collaborative working. APO33 projects often use networked and physical spaces, develop tools (hardware/software) for its creative projects and the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community of artists and programmers.

RESIDENCY: APO33 invites artists annually to develop new work in situ. The resident will have the opportunity to work towards an exhibition, presentation, experimentation reflecting on these working methods and forms of collaboration, depending on the proposal. The residency usually entails two levels of development: a first preparation stage (approximately 1 month) installation, performance … or to realise a performance project or architectural construction and a second stage where space is open to the public (visit, participate and feedback). APO33 will provide technical assistance to artists and expert assistance to those using digital media open to exploring FLOSS software and programming tools. In addition artists are invited to give a public talk around their practice and project at APO33. We will give preference to those applicants with a strong desire to exchange and collaborate with the APO33 project as a whole.

APO33 will provide accommodation, pay travel costs, sustenance and a small production budget. http://www.apo33.org

HOW TO APPLY:
Send a PDF* with the following information included to: apo33.proposal2012@gmail.com
FULL NAME (+ ALIAS if applicable)
EMAIL
COUNTRY & CITY OF RESIDENCE
DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT
MOTIVATION
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
URL
ANY OTHER INFORMATION IN SUPPORT OF YOUR APPLICATION

*PDF should be no more than 2MB
Deadline: Friday 9th, December, 2011

FutureEverything is now inviting submissions to the open call for the 2012 festival art programme.
Project proposals should respond to the art theme and you should submit your entry using the Art Open Call form.

http://www.formstack.com/forms/?1124036-JwXVm275DG

Art Programme 2012 Thematic Statement

Today it is increasingly easy for people to participate in the media, whether it is in the form of reality TV, so-called participatory democracy, crowdsourcing, or social networks. Anybody who is connected to the networks can make media artefacts that can reach a vast audience, recombine other such artefacts almost limitlessly, share ideas, content and engage in debate all over the globe, and foster new forms of virtual community.

Crowdsourcing treats people as ‘clickworkers’, the drone bees, working tirelessly on their small task, but without an audible voice or visible face among the multitude of others, and with no stake in the outcome, or necessarily even an awareness of the big picture – welcome to the userfarm!

FutureEverything’s festival art programme 2012 looks beyond crowdsourcing for ways to bring out or expose the traces of our singular individuality, and our innate creativity, and dignity, in the anonymity of the network. People can collaborate with tens or thousands of strangers across networks to create original, sometimes beautiful media objects in which the results of individual creativity can be seen. Or participate in social revolutions, using new technologies that enable their voice to be heard, their point of view appreciated.

The creative possibilities of these participatory technologies are extraordinary. New forms of media platform, in broadcast, music video and games, harness citizen contributions and data trails, both individual and collective. Increasing numbers of creative projects are based in many people finding things, and creating something new from the things they find. New forms of art, and of artist, are beginning to emerge.

Recent world events demonstrate the emergence of this new participatory culture begs some serious questions about community and cooperation in a massively networked world. Older forms of social organisation may need to be rethought at a time when cooperation happens between individuals coming together in arbitrary ways online.

2012 is a good year in which to rethink these ideas. It is the centenary of the Cooperative Movement, and seventy five years since the beginnings of the Mass Observation movement, each of which have roots in Manchester. Citizen-led content and experience in an increasingly digitally connected world is a principle theme of the new AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub for the Creative Economy, led by FutureEverything’s academic partner Lancaster University. The political implications can be seen in Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and Wikileaks.

The art programme at FutureEverything 2012 will bring these issues to life through the work of artists, researchers and designers that provoke and inspire with new perspectives on this theme. FutureEverything is an ideal platform for this project, owing to its long-term engagement with questions of mass participation and crowd sensing and its close relation to the new AHRC hub.

The deadline is 9 January 2012.
Deadline: Monday 9th, January, 2012

TRANSART INSTITUTE seeks independent, inquisitive and imaginative artists for its low-residency MFA program. In a uniquely international setting, Transart offers an accredited two year course for working artists, teachers and all professionals in related fields who are seeking advancement in visual arts and new media. The program consists of three intensive summer residencies in Europe filled with lectures, workshops, critiques, seminars, performances and exhibitions and two shorter winter residencies in New York City. In the four semesters between residencies, students create an individual course of study realizing art and research projects with the support of faculty and self-chosen advisors wherever they work and live. A detailed program description is online.

THE MFA PROGRAM is geared towards the development of a sustainable artistic praxis rather than training in certain media or genres, challenging students to think conceptually and work creatively in new ways. Current students work with animation, choreography, curating, digital media, drawing, film, graphic design, installation, intervention, music, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, software, sound, text art, video and writing. More details online.

TRANSART FACULTY comes from a wide range of academic and artistic backgrounds as well as geographic locations. Current theoretical areas of expertise include curatorial work, cyberfeminism, African diaspora, interface technologies, digital arts, continental philosophy, media, social studies in colonialism, capitalism and tourism, word and image relationships, and contemporary asian art history. Studio faculty include international artists working with sound, performance, dance and choreography, photography, drawing, sculpture, film and video, intervention and installation art. Details online.

TRANSART STUDENTS are emerging and mid-career artists and educators at tertiary institutions. Transart Institute’s residencies are a meeting place for cultural exchange. Transart students and alumni will converge for the summer residency from areas as diverse as Italy, Egypt, Pakistan, Iceland, Croatia, Ethiopia, Canada, Costa Rica, the UK and the US. For many students the time at Transart is a transformational experience. New York based artist Virgil Wong found “The community I’ve become a part of through Transart is already much more immersive than what I’ve developed in ten years of living and working as an artist in New York City”. Photographer and performer Angelika Rinnhofer found that “to work independently can pose a challenge but it also offers freedom and flexibility. Since a large number of students are accomplished artists and earn a living, Transart’s concept is ideal to work toward a degree and to expand one’s artistic career in addition to having a job.” For composer and artist David Dunn “perhaps the most important aspect of the program, to me personally, has been the realization of just how constrained my professional life can be. I have no lack of colleagues or opportunities to present my work but my network of association tends to reinforce a particular set of intellectual and aesthetic assumptions that become ‘the’ set of assumptions. Transart succeeds at prying apart some of those entrenched viewpoints to provide space for new ideas and concerns. The truly international makeup of the students and faculty reinforces this.” More details online.

EARLY APPLICATION DEADLINE is December 1st, 2011. Applications can be submitted online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION please contact program leader Klaus Knoll: knoll@transart.org

PHONE: +1 (347) 410-9905
Deadline: Thursday 1st, December, 2011

HERE has been one of New York’s most prolific producing organizations since 1993, and today, stands at the forefront of the city’s presenters of daring new hybrid art. We have a long history of supporting unique and innovative artists, ensuring them the opportunity to develop and perform original work as well as assist them in enhancing their skill in all areas of artistic work. Through the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), artists are able to develop their work in a peer-based program designed to nurture new and unique work. Our community of mid-career resident artists meet monthly, show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full-scale productions.

HERE is currently accepting applications to HARP which commissions and develops new hybrid works over a 1- to 3-year period.
For more information regarding the HERE Artist Residency Program and how to apply, please visit: http://here.org/programs/harp/
Deadline: Monday 2nd, January, 2012

CoLab is a project aimed at developing a new profile of creator/researcher though the creation of interdisciplinary work groups to carry out projects collaboratively. This call is aimed at the selection of 10 multidisciplinary projects.
Projects selected through this call will be developed within the context of the European Film Festival 11 Sudan (EFF11) to expand these methodologies to new creation and contemporary thinking spaces.

> Call for projects. Deadline: October 31, 2011
> Call for collaborators: November 3 – 27, 2011
> Workshop: November 28 – December 1, 2011

Venue: French Cultural Center, Khartoum, Sudan.

More information: http://medialab-prado.es/article/colab
Deadline: Thursday 29th, December, 2011

Call for participation

The Xth Sense (XS) is a free and open source based technology; as such, its free distribution is an integral aspect of the research.
In this workshop participants build their own XS biosensor and learn how to generate interactive music from the muscle sounds of their bodies.
http://marcodonnarumma.com/teaching/xth-sense-biophysical-music

We still have few places available in the UK and Mexico sessions.
Please, see the schedule below and the related links if you wish to register and learn more about the contents.
________________________________

Winter workshops schedule:

- 7o Simposio Internacional del Posgrado en Artes Visuales
3,4,5,7,10 November at the UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico DF, MX.
http://www.artesvisuales.unam.mx/7simposioartesunam/mdonnarumma.html

- CultureLab
21-25 November, Newcastle, UK.
http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/news-and-events/2011/10/18/xth-sense-biophysical-generation-and-control-of-music

- Matadac Festival
12-15 December, Madrid, ES.
Info will follow soon.
Deadline: Monday 12th, December, 2011

A NEW AWARD FROM THE UDK BERLIN !

Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)
The UdK Berlin is one of the biggest, most traditional institutions of advanced artistic education in the world. It has the right to award doctorates and post-doctoral lecturing qualifications and offers more than 40 study courses covering the full spectrum of the arts and related academic fields. With its Colleges of Fine Art, Design, Music and Performing Arts and the Central Institute of Continuing Education it is one of the few centres of advanced art education in Germany with university status.

The Competition
Art and science are moving towards one another, discovering common issues and working methods. The creative, imaginative processes in the arts and sciences are similar, whereas the concrete realisation of their results tends to differ. Repeatedly, this difference is the source of productive tension and areas of friction. In all disciplines of the arts and sciences, further developments over recent decades have been characterised by mutual influences and efforts at differentiation. Today, traditional dividing lines between the spheres can no longer be maintained; they are being newly defined and presented in their permeability.

This competition aims to give the impetus and opportunity to artists (fine art, media, architecture, design, music, theatre, visual communication etc.) and scientists to work between the priorities of the arts or between the arts and science.

Participants
Individuals and groups are eligible to participate. Full-time employees of the UdK Berlin, as well as students of the UdK Berlin and other colleges/universities are excluded.

Entry Deadline
The deadline for entries is March 1, 2012. The registration form including detailed information can be requested from the address below and is also available as a download.

Prize
The prize will be awarded on a biennial basis and is endowed with 7,500 Euros.

Jury
The jury under the chairmanship of the President of the UdK Berlin consists of the Chair of the Commission for Artistic and Scientific Projects at the UdK Berlin, the Director of the Postgraduate School of the UdK Berlin and four additional jurors who do not belong to the UdK Berlin in any way and have shown outstanding achievements in their own professional fields.

more info: http://www.udk-berlin.de/sites/content/topics/contests/international/wettbewerb_udk_preis/

Contact partner
Universität der Künste Berlin
Communications and Marketing
Inge Scheffler / Joachim Schwalbe
Postfach 120544
D-10595 Berlin

Fax: +49 (0) 30 3185 2821
E-mail: udk-preis@udk-berlin.de

Download Regulations 2012 (PDF: 84KB)

Deadline: Thursday 1st, March, 2012

http://eyebeam.org/get-involved-fellowships/calls/2012-fellowships

CONTEXT: Eyebeam is the leading not-for-profit art and technology center in the USA. Our unique collaborative environment fosters fellowships and residencies, research, education, public programming, and a vital web space, eyebeam.org. We are located in the heart of NYC’s Chelsea art district in a resource rich 15,000 sq. ft. space. Please see the Fellows and Projects sections of our web site for information on current and previous work developed at Eyebeam.

OVERVIEW: Eyebeam is seeking applications from artists, hackers, engineers, designers, curators, and creative technologists to participate in our Fellowship program. Fellows at Eyebeam spearhead new research and develop new work. The ideal Fellow has experience working with and making innovative technological art or creative technology projects, and has a passion for collaborative development. Fellows will bring this experience and working approach to Eyebeam where they will have the opportunity to engage in their own independent projects, projects initiated by other Residents or Fellows, and projects conceived collaboratively with Eyebeam’s staff and research partners.

Up to three Fellows will be selected to join continuing residents and fellows for an upcoming 11-month cycle, ideally beginning in mid-March but potentially in the summer or fall of 2012. If a summer or fall start date is preferable, please indicate that on your application inside the “additional information” section. Selected Fellows will be expected to spend at least four days per week working at Eyebeam. Fellows are expected to contribute to the Eyebeam community as collaborative partners to residents and mentors to youth working at Eyebeam and as principal leads in research initiatives, programs, and public engagement as well as leaders in Research Groups (explained below).

SUPPORT: Fellows receive a $30,000 stipend during their stay in NYC with Eyebeam as well as 24/7 access to Eyebeam equipment and dedicated work areas. It is possible for Fellows to take on additional external teaching or consulting work, as long as s/he can fulfill commitments to Eyebeam at the same time.

For full details visit http://eyebeam.org/get-involved-fellowships/calls/2012-fellowships
Deadline: Friday 18th, November, 2011

http://anclab.org/Art.Science.2012

The Arts and Creativity Lab & the Interactive and Digital Media Institute are pleased to announce the 2012 Arts/Science Residency program at the National University of Singapore. Selected artists will be invited to spend 1 month living on the NUS campus, engaging with students and the local arts community as they conduct projects exploring and making connections between art and science.

The Art/Science Residency is made possible with the support of the National Arts Council of Singapore, and the National University of Singapore Tembusu and University Scholars Program residential colleges.

Themes for 2012 Art/Science Residency program and potential research institution affiliates are:

Water
Aquatic Science Centre @ Sungei Ulu Pandan and the Singapore-Delft Water Alliance

Quantum Technologies
Center for Quantum Technologies

Acoustic Ecologies
Yong Seow Toh Conservatory of Music and the IDMI Arts and Creativity Lab

Biology in context
Asian Biopoleis

Selection – Proposals will be evaluated by the ASR Review Committee comprised of NUS science and arts faculty members. Proposals will be judged for
- artistic merit,
- potential to engage audience, participants, researchers, local artists, and community in the project through seminars, development, or realization of the work.
- potential to involve students,
- thematic relevance,
- connection to SE Asian region,
- budget,
- feasibility.

Time Period – One-month residencies are available starting on the following dates:

- Jan 29 – Feb 26, 2012
- March 25 – April 22, 2012
- Sept 2 – 30, 2012
- October 28 – Nov 25, 2012

Funding Support – Resident Artists will be provided with NUS campus housing and board, SD$3200/month artist fee, travel to and from Singapore, and are eligible to receive funding for materials and resources up to SD$5000.

Proposals – Application forms can be downloaded from the website, and should be submitted by email (address on application form). Deadline October 29, 2011.

Expectations Management:

Student involvement – Residency projects will be publicized in advance, but student will have their normal course loads during residency periods, and their involvement with the projects will be voluntary.

Research Lab Involvement: Research Directors relevant to the Themes have agreed to facilitate engagement with their labs. This may include access to space, equipment, contact with researchers, lab seminar presentations, etc. However, the involvement of students and researchers in Labs will be voluntary.

Web: http://anclab.org/Art.Science.2012

Application Forms: http://anclab.org/downloads/ASR2012/ASRApplication.doc
Deadline: Sunday 23rd, October, 2011

Congrats to our peers at CONT3XT.NET (guest cur-editors of VT 11) on their forthcoming book – note the details below.

Content | Form | Im-material – Five Years of CONT3XT.NET

Authors: Josephine Bosma, Mary-Anne Breeze – aka netwurker, Sarah Cook, Thomas Dreher, Constant Dullaart, Mark E. Grimm, Jeremy Hight, Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Jan Robert Leegte, Mia Makela, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, Stefan Nowotny, Les Liens Invisibles, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair, Pall Thayer, Marius Watz

Artists: Maria Anwander, Anna Artaker, Ruben Aubrecht, Miriam Bajtala, Ryan Barone, Mary-Anne Breeze – aka netwurker, Charles Broskoski, Codemanipulator®, Arend deGryuter-Helfer and Aylor Brown, Gerhard Dirmoser, Aleksandra Domanovic, Reynald Drouhin, Nikolaus Gansterer, Christina Goestl, Jochen Höller, Karl Heinz Jeron und Valie Djordjevic, Michael Kargl, Annja Krautgasser, Miriam Laussegger and Eva Beierheimer, Jan Robert Leegte, Ralo Mayer, Michail Michailov, MTAA – M. River and T. Whid Art Associates, Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit, Jörg Piringer, Lisa Rastl, Arnold Reinthaler, Veronika Schubert, Johanna Tinzl and Stefan Flunger, UBERMORGEN.COM, Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak

Bibliographic information: CONT3XT.NET – Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair (eds.): “Content | Form | Im-material”, Verlag fuer moderne Kunst Nuernberg, 2011, 21 x 14,8 cm, approx. 100 coloured images, 264 pages, ISBN 978-3-86984-187-8, with an introductory essay by Steve Dietz

 

 

Just a quick note to say — I'll be at this event at V2__ in Rotterdam (V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam) Thursday September 29..so if you're around, you should come. If you're not — you should dial-in: ((This event will be streamed live at http://live.v2.nl))

Beyond the flying car: join top designers Julian Bleecker (Nokia, Near Future Laboratory), Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Really Interesting Group), and Anab Jain (Superflux) in an exploration of speculative design.
We are rapidly entering (and perhaps even have already entered) an era where we are able to print 3D objects at our desks, make and share laser-cut gifts for friends, and use off-the-shelf tools to plug these creations into the web and have them send status updates on our behalf. We have some commonly-held visions of the future, but what could our very wildest dreams (and nightmares) look like, beyond the cliché of the flying car? What answers can we find in speculative design? Our expert guests will explore these questions in collaboration with the audience in a hands-on, "open think-tank" format.

Addressing this contemporary issue will be Julian Bleecker: designer, researcher at the Design Strategic Projects studio at Nokia Design and co-founder of Near Future Laboratory; Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino: product designer, entrepreneur, and partner at Really Interesting Group (London); and Anab Jain: interaction designer, founder of Superflux, and recent TED Fellow.

Following a brief talk show with Julian, Alexandra, and Anab, the audience will have the unique opportunity to collaborate with our invited experts in an "open think-tank": a guided speculative design session wherein we'll address the product design challenges of the near and not-so-near future.

Related PostsSpeculative Design Workshop: The Era of Objects at V2_Design Fiction Workshop at UX Week 2011Design Culture Lab: Ethnographic Fiction & Speculative Design Workshop

The eyes are the window to the soul. That is why we ask people to look us in the eye and tell us the truth. Or why we get worried when someone gives us the evil eye or has a wandering eye. Our language is full of expressions that refer to where people are looking--particularly if they happen to be looking in our direction.
As social primates, humans are keenly interested in determining the direction of gaze of other humans. It is important for evaluating their intentions and critical for forming bonds and negotiating relationships. Lovers stare for long stretches into each other’s eyes, and infants focus intently on the eyes of their parents. Even very young babies look at simple representations of faces for longer than they look at similar cartoonish faces in which the eyes and other features have been scrambled.

Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn by Cathy N. Davidson. Viking Adult, 2011

Urban life can be trying--cars and buses honk, passersby jostle, concrete and brick win out over grass and trees. Researchers have known for decades that residents of densely populated areas have higher rates of mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. But do the brains of city dwellers function any differently from those of rural folk? Studies are showing that they do.
German researchers recently asked subjects from large cities, small cities and the countryside to undergo a standard psychological stress test--doing arithmetic under time pressure--while having their brain imaged with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Current city living, testing found, correlated with a boost in activity in a brain region called the amygdala, which is associated with memory and emotional intelligence, with a particularly large effect in people from big cities. Even more surprising, subjects who had grown up in a city showed higher activation of a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, essentially the amygdala’s boss, even if they had later moved to the suburbs or country. The findings were published this past summer in the journal Nature . ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Haitz Law in action over the past decades.
Just like Moore’s Law has been predicting improvements in the semiconductors used to make computer processors for decades, Haitz’s Law (see above) predicts an exponential improvement in the semiconductors used in LED technology. The beauty is that we’re almost there – see my LED reviews – so for [...]

The guys over in Israel continue to do great work, this time it’s an innovative and slightly different/weird kind of digital billboard. Called “Smile Stations”, Facebook fans of Prigat, a leading juice company, had the opportunity to send real time messages to interactive digital billboards at various train stations in the hope of getting passers [...]Related Digital Buzz Posts:KRAFT Smile Tagging App: Grin and Share it.Nike Shout: Game Day Social Installation“Saving Lives” Interactive Digital Billboard

A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

Amsterdam - STEIM (Studio for electro-instrumental music) organizza il Patterns + Pleasure Festival il 26, 27 e 28 Settembre al Frascati di Amsterdam. http://www.digicult.it/2011/Patterns+Pleasure.asp

You might not realize this until you get poked in the eye, but sight’s pretty great. It’s not just what allows us to move about a space confidently but also, in the words of a cliche, what you need to do with something before you can believe something.

But our sight is not impervious to failure, it turns out. As our eyes fervently attempt to establish relationships with the environment, they fall prey to illusions of pattern and continuity within that space, glitches in the brain’s visual processing. These deceptions are granted power in Echochrome, a spatial puzzle game by Sony’s Japan studio in which a player’s stationary two-dimensional perception of space becomes the true nature of that space. That is to say, if you rotate your on-screen perspective to make it look like two separate structures are connected, that perceptual bridge has become an actual bridge, and your character can assuredly – impossibly – cross it.

<iframe width="584" height="358" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6mNLFA8fu2g" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Footage from Hazard: The Journey of Life, which has evolved into Antichamber
Empowered visual deception is also a large part of Alexander Bruce’s Antichamber (formerly Hazard: The Journey of Life), which was shown at this year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. The game’s introduction is, like the M.C. Escheresque title that preceded it, a visual re-education exercise. Bruce says it serves to help the player “un-learn” all the things they have grown to expect about virtual environments. Specifically, expectations relating to existing perceptions of such dependable things as linear space, physics, consequences and the role of the environment itself.

Once these prejudices are disposed of, moving about Antichamber becomes a euphoric, labyrinthine head-trip, messing with your psychology far more than any amount of shooting guns at virtual people can. And there’s more on the way. Polytron’s highly-anticipated platformer, Fez begins with a realization that its seemingly two-dimensional game world is actually three-dimensional. Marc Ten Bosch’s award-winning game Miegakure goes even further, into the 4th dimension. With games beginning to more frequently offer strange and unexpected experiences, it’s nice to see “perceptual reality distortions” ranked firmly among the genres and concepts being explored.

Connections:
Miegakure: Gaming In The Fourth Dimension
KICK IT!: A Game About Jumping Off Psychedelic Skyscrapers
Loop Raccord, A Game About Playing With Animated GIFs

The art of Hacking si focalizza sul lato artistico della pirateria. Gli artisti partecipanti sottolineano le imperfezioni della vita quotidiana che ci circonda. I progetti sovvertono, migliorano o raggirano i sistemi e le pratiche ufficiali offrendo alternative. A livello superficiale, la pirateria è spesso associata all’espansione di virus in rete e ad altri attacchi digitali. Ufficialmente, però, tutte le attività criminali non sono realmente considerate pirateria, ma “cracking”. Le reali procedure della pirateria si basano su molti altri motivi positivi e artistici. È uno state of mind ed esistono codici etici complessi all’interno della comunità degli hacker.http://www.digicult.it/2011/TheArtOfHacking.asp

Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely--a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing.
Approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, according to a Gallup poll. Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death-- one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were.

From Monet to Tiger Woods, or why creating rituals and breaking routines don’t have to be conflicting notions.

“Creativity is like chasing chickens,” Christoph Niemann once said. But sometimes it can feel like being chased by chickens — giant, angry, menacing chickens. Whether you’re a writer, designer, artist or maker of anything in any medium, you know the creative process can be plagued by fear, often so paralyzing it makes it hard to actually create. Today, we turn to insights on fear and creativity from five favorite books on the creative process and the artist’s way.

ART & FEAR
Despite our best-argued cases for incremental innovation and creativity via hard work, the myth of the genius and the muse perseveres in how we think about great artists. And yet most art, statistically speaking, is made by non-geniuses but people with passion and dedication who face daily challenges and doubts, both practical and psychological, in making their art. (And let’s pause here to observe that “art” can encompass an incredible range of creative output, from painting to music to literature and everything in between.) In Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, working artists David Bayles and Ted Orland explore not only how art gets made, but also how it doesn’t — what stands in the way of the creative process and how to overcome it. Fear, of course, is a cornerstone of those obstacles.

In the ideal — that is to say, real — artist, fears not only continue to exist, they exist side by side with the desires that complement them, perhaps drive them, certainly feed them. Naive passion, which promotes work done in ignorance of obstacles, becomes — with courage — informed passion, which promotes work done in full acceptance of those obstacles.”

THE WAR OF ART
Steven Pressfield is a prolific champion of the creative process, with all its trials and tribulations. You might recall his most recent book, Do The Work, from our omnibus of five manifestos for life. But Pressfield is best-known for The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, which tackles our greatest forms of resistance (“Resistance” with a capital R, that is) to the creative process head-on.

Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”

THE CREATIVE HABIT
There’s hardly a creative bibliophile who hasn’t read, or at least heard of, Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. It frames creativity as the product of preparation, routine and persistent effort — which may at first seem counterintuitive in the context of the Eureka! myth and our notion of the genius suddenly struck by a brilliant idea, but Tharp demonstrates it’s the foundation of how cultural icons and everyday creators alike, from Beethoven to professional athletes to ordinary artists, hone their craft, cultivate their genius and overcome their fears.

There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.”

Athletes know the power of triggering a ritual. A pro golfer may walk along the fairway chatting with his caddie, his playing partner, a friendly official or scorekeeper, but when he stands behind the ball and takes a deep breath, he has signaled to himself it’s time to concentrate. A basketball player comes to the free-throw line, touches his socks, his shorts, receives the ball, bounces it exactly three times, and then he is ready to rise and shoot, exactly as he’s done a hundred times a day in practice. By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.”

THE COURAGE TO CREATE
In 1975, six years after the great success of his wildly influential book Love & Will, existential psychologist Rollo May published The Courage to Create — an insightful and compelling case for art and creativity as the centripetal force, not a mere tangent, of human experience, and a foundation to science and logic. May draws on his extensive experience as a therapist to offer a blueprint for breaking out of our patterns of creative stagnation. Particularly interesting are his observations on fear, technology and irrationality, which might at first seem akin to the teachno-paranoia propagated by Orson Welles and, more recently, Nicholas Carr, but are in fact considered counsel against our propensity for escapism, all the more relevant in the age of the digital convergence, nearly four decades after May’s insights.

What people today do of fear of irrational elements in themselves and in other people is to put tools and mechanisms between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being grasped by the the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection against consciousness. [...] This means that technology can be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological creativity [...] is a threat to its own existence.”

TRUST THE PROCESS
More than 13 years later, Shaun McNiff’s Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go remains a cocoon of creative reassurance that unpacks the artist’s process into small, simple, yet remarkably effective steps that together choreograph a productive and inspired sequence of creativity. Never preachy or patronizing, McNiff captures both the exhilaration and the terror of creating — and, more importantly, how the two complement one another, even in the face of fear.

The empty space is the great horror and stimulant of creation. But there is also something predictable in the way the fear and apathy encountered at the beginning are accountable for feelings of elation at the end. These intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control, but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.”

When asked for advice on painting, Claude Monet told people not to fear mistakes. The discipline of art requires constant experimentation, wherein errors are harbingers of original ideas because they introduce new directions for expression. The mistake is outside the intended course of action, and it may present something that we never saw before, something unexpected and contradictory, something that may be put to use.”

* * *

What helps you with your creative process? What insight or advice, in a book or elsewhere, have you found the most help and comfort in?

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It seems tablets are not just a hit with humankind. Cat lovers are using the iPad to entertain their furry friends ... yep, there are iPad apps for cats. Here's a look at what's out there for those brave enough to try dispensing feline diversions of the digital kind...
Continue Reading What's new Pussycat? iPad apps for catsSection: Pet GizmosTags: Cats,
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iPad Apps

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As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer, who’s the star of this TED talk, has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other hilarious and really very sad beliefs, paranoias and theories. But he’s not about debunking for debunking’s sake. Shermer is a staunch defender of the idea that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science. In order to pulverize the notion that explosives caused the World Trade Center towers to fall on 9/11, for instance, one should call upon demolition experts. (That’s exactly what his magazine did; it’s deliciously nerdy and fascinating.)

Shermer’s work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion and our tendency toward patternicity, which explains why we sometimes hear Satanic lyrics when we play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, which we do sometimes, for some reason. In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves. We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren’t looking for.

As you might imagine, the comments on TED’s website are even better than the video.

People deal with tragedy in different ways using the tools they have at their disposal. Painters paint, writers write, and gamers mod.

Lately, I've been interested in seeing how game modders and mappers have recreated the World Trade Center, the events of September 11, and the WTC Memorial in various game engines. Some of these are profane and offensive, quite likely made by teens that have no first-hand memory of the disaster, but most are intended as tributes. Here's the best of what I was able to find.
Continue reading... 

Having a calming voice like that of John Cleese or Ozzy Osbourne shout out directions to supplement the visuals on your GPS navigation device is an effective way to make sure that you don't miss your turn. Relying on visual navigation is a big distraction for cyclists too, dangerously diverting focus away from the road ahead. To help overcome such issues, a research team in the Netherlands has reported promising results from an audio-only navigation system that uses an Android smartphone connected to a pair of headphones to help guide users to a target location with music that's artificially shifted to the left or right to indicate direction...
Continue Reading Experimental navigation system guides cyclists using musicSection: Urban TransportTags: Bicycles,
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Music,
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The Vault
The traditional office has become less important as more people work via mobile phone and a laptop computer, and coworking is becoming a popular alternative.  Members get many of the benefits of office life — a community, a work environment, and meeting spaces — without giving up the freedom of working on their own [...]

Our video mix this Friday includes little flying robots, little reconfigurable robots, a little robot controlled by a glove, and a movie trailer with a not-so-little amount of robot carnage

Give a robot a cup, and it'll recognize that cup. Teach a robot about cups, and it'll recognize all kinds of cups and be able to load your dishwasher to boot

A Techwise Conversation with Jon Wiley, a happiness researcher at Google

call for entries: 15th Japan Media Arts Festival, National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan, February 22 – March 4 2012

The festival is organized by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, with the aim of promoting the creation and development of media arts (comic, animation, game and media art). Invited are entries for the categories Art, Entertainment, Animation and Manga.

details: http://www.bunka-jmaf.jp/en
deadline: September 22 2011
Deadline: Thursday 22nd, September, 2011

In the 1960s, Stanley Lunetta created a number of interactive scultures using electronic audio generators. Some of them were still running as of 2008. Some responded to elements such as heat and light to change the sounds, others had more explicit human interactive elements.

You can find more information at Lunetta’s site, including the Moosack Machines section.

(Thanks Zir)

(A Generative Art Lost Chapter)

Through the process of writing Generative Art there were various tangents and miscellaneous-mad-shit that, usually in the name of brevity and clarity, ended up on the cutting room floor. What follows is one such tangent reworked into a brief tutorial. In the week that the Processing 2.0 Beta gets its release this would seem an appropriate time to share this on CAN, as it mentions one of P5-2′s coolest features: publishing to HTML5.

The tutorial is in three sections:

1. “… A Practical Guide Using HTML5″

To me, the why is always as important as the how. So first allow me to explain why this is relevant, even though it didn’t make the book.

2. Processing to JavaScript – The Ridiculously Easy Way

HTML Canvas for Processing Users. The two minute version.

3. Generative Art in JavaScript – The Harder, But Still Ridiculously Easy, Way

Cutting out the middle man. How you might get started with nothing but a JavaScript enabled browser to hand.
Continue reading.... Generative Art In HTML5 [Processing, JavaScript, Tutorial]

Time for some links! Denise pointed out this amazing video of the (planned) destruction of a shoe factory in Leicester played backwards, in slow-motion, which is as odd as it sounds, but strangely hypnotic when you’re also listening to the soundtrack.

Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

Matt Jones pointed out (via @danmog) this vertigo-inducing high resolution picture of engineers fixing the antenna at the top of the Empire State building.

Alex Jarvis pointed out a video of a particularly scary deforestation proto-robot, the John Deere H414.

Lastly, Matt Webb pointed out Joe Hughes’ post on UI explorations with a MetaWatch. As Joe says in his post:

MetaWatch is a line of hacker-friendly wristwatches that can be paired with smartphones to enable new kinds of lightweight interactions.

That’s it! Have a happy weekend. It’s now time to join my colleagues at the pub.

We’re seeing more and more offerings designed to let the weary recharge in public spaces, a service particularly appreciated by those craving a rest while traveling through international airports. Much the way Nemorelax pods let travelers catch a few winks between flights, so the Russian-made Sleepbox offers something similar.
Targeted at airports and railroad stations as well as hostels and even offices, the Sleepbox is a small, self-contained cabin designed to give users a quiet place to get some rest. Each ventilated unit reportedly measures 1.4 meters wide by two meters long and 2.3 meters high, housing a bed crafted from polymer foam and pulp tissue which changes its linens automatically. Luggage space, WiFi, electrical outlets and an LCD TV are also included. The creation of Moscow-based OOO Sleepbox, the units offer airports, airlines and hotels a way to earn extra revenue, whether as a standard part of the airport or as a brand butler offering in a frequent flyer lounge, for example. Suggested rental rates are USD 15 per hour or USD 50 per night. Single, double and triple Sleepbox units are available at prices starting at EUR 7,000. With an average annual income of USD 30,000 per unit, investments pay back in six to nine months, the company says.
Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport already features a Sleepbox, and the first hostel equipped solely with the units will open in Moscow next year. Meanwhile, OOO Sleepbox welcomes inquiries from potential territory-exclusive operators and distributors. Time to help bring some extra rest to a sleep-deprived world?
Website: www.sleepbox.com Contact: info@sleepbox.com

I often talk about how building AI could be dangerous. Here I want to talk a little bit about how building AI could be a great thing. Of course I am talking about general AI exceeding human intelligence. I would say, “equal to or exceeding”, but human-equivalence in AI is basically anthropocentrism, akin to thinking that extraterrestrial visitors will have roughly human-equivalent technology rather than blatantly sophisticated technology. If we have general AI at all, we will likely have superintelligent general AI. It is implausible that AIs will stall around the human-equivalent level for long, if at all.

Some reasons that come to mind for building AI are those of scientific or philosophical interest.

…proves we understand intelligence in enough detail to create one.
…indicates that intelligence is substrate-independent.
…is an important step towards our mastery of physical reality.
…continues the Copernican revolutionary trend.
…will give us a tool to understand the mind better than ever before.
…allows for psychology to be turned into a truly hard science.
…gives astrobiologists a look at “aliens” without having to travel.
…produces a truly new outlook on the universe and other minds.
…gives us a window into what it’d be like to be self-transparent.
…will give us a guide before ourselves embarking into new mindspace.
…might let us unlock the mysteries of conscious experience.

It’s difficult to overstate the philosophical or scientific doors that would be opened by creating a true artificial intelligence.

Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It’s run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

The result is a collective “android dream”, blending man and machine to create an artificial lifeform.

MyMicrobes MyMicrobes
A German nonprofit, called MyMicrobes, is hoping you'll want to get your gut bacteria's genomes sequenced. It's expensive, but you'll get access to one of the most exclusive social networks around, where people worldwide can, um, talk about their gastrointestinal difficulties with like-minded people. Two grand seems cheap when we put it like that!

Actually, MyMicrobes does sound like an interesting project, even if we have a visceral reaction to any new social network or even the phrase social network or really anything relating to social networks that doesn't star Justin Timberlake. Peer Bork, a biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, is behind MyMicrobes. It's expensive to start--it'll cost about $2,100 to get your gut bacteria sequenced, which involves mailing a fecal sample to Germany (seriously). That's expensive compared to, say, 23andMe, which is inclined to host crazy sales even despite the cheap entry fee. But apparently the gut bacteria is a much trickier genome to sequence than the human, with a few billion more lines of DNA to decipher.

In any case, MyMicrobes is hoping to create a social network so as to gather as much data as possible from folks actually suffering from gastrointestinal disorders. They estimate they'll need about 5,000 applicants before they can really glean meaningful data out of the social network, which may be difficult due to the cost. Still, it's definitely a one-of-a-kind project, and if you love talking about the intricacies of your gut, there aren't a ton of places to do it.

[Nature]

Former Ning CEO and co-founder Gina Bianchini has launched a new social application called Mightybell, which tries to help people create, achieve and share experiences using step-by-step actions. The application is available on the iPhone and on the web.

The idea of Mightybell is to break up a specific goal or action into smaller steps, allowing people to experience something new every day. Each Mightybell Experience includes multiple steps, which are defined by a creator and shared with friends, fans, and followers over social media. It can be anything from getting a job, completing a task, or preparing for a vacation. An early example is a travel guide for 10 “down and dirty” days in southeast Alaska.

Creators and users can track their progress using analytics that show how an experience is faring. Creators can see what users are doing, and users can measure their progress and record their actions. Bianchini said social users are craving more than just status updates and sharing; they want to achieve things in the real world and help others to do it, too.

“Mightybell seeks to offer creators, instigators, bloggers, organizers, operatives, entertainers, artists, teachers, guides, and everyone’s alpha friend a simple way to take new social technologies and turn them into compelling experiences for people in the real world,” Bianchini said. “We think the next innovation in social software will be its impact on daily life.”

Mightybell was founded last year after Bianchini left Ning and joined Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur in residence. The company has raised a $2.1 million seed round late last year led by Floodgate and First Round Capital, with a handful of other angel investors participating.

The idea seems stem from the larger goal of using social and web tools to promote self-improvement. Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp. recently backed a start-up called Lift, which tries to improve human potential through reinforcement. It’s a concept that’s certainly becoming more popular now, as familiar names turn their attention to this next opportunity in social software.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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Just as today’s prevalent smoking bans can lead to a lot of cigarette butts on the doorsteps of public places, so the increasingly smoke-free world can make it difficult for smokers to find a place to enjoy their habit. Enter Croatian cigarette brand Ronhill, which has begun to use QR codes on its packaging to help consumers find a nearby place to smoke.
Ronhill, a part of Adris Group’s TDR, worked with agency Bruketa&Žinic OM to create what it says is the world’s first interactive cigarette packaging. Specifically, included on the packaging for its Ronhill Unlimited line is a QR code. Smartphone users simply scan that code with their phone’s camera to get to a regional mobile website featuring a map showing not only the user’s current location but also places nearby where smoking is allowed. Users can also update the list of such places themselves. The video below demonstrates the technology in action:

Also this summer, Bruketa&Žinic OM added a QR code to Ronhill’s seasonal “Sailing” line, linking this time to a site with local information and an up-to-date list of events. Brands large and small: how could a splash of technology make your packaging more useful and interactive?
Website: www.tdr.hr/unlimited/HR/index.html Contact: tdr@tdr.hr
Spotted by: Florent Lesauvage

Ben Bogart is a Canadian artist whose works encompass science, machine creativity and open source ethics. His innovative and fascinating investigations on artificial imagination and machine learning are effectively demonstrated through his body of work, which is neatly underpinned and strongly characterized by a critical analysis of the paradigm of creativity.

[Output from Dreaming Machine #1]

Marco Donnarumma: Ben, to what extent can creativity be investigated through algorithmic means and which of your works best embodies such a practice? In which ways can the development of creative machines foster a better understanding of individuals as makers?

Ben Bogart: My research group (MAMAS), directed by Philippe Pasquier, my Ph.D. supervisor) is a group of students and faculty many of whom are working on "metacreation", where we attempt to design systems that exhibit creative behaviour. Personally, I came to academia not to explore creativity directly (creative machines that is), but origination: how something (idea, form, life, universe) could come to be. The early genesis of this thinking is apparent in my 2005 paper "untitled iterations" in Vague Terrain. I started my M.Sc. degree with the idea of making a site-specific artwork that could "find its own relationship to its context". Eventually this lead to research on creativity and creative machines. Memory Association Machine (MAM) (2007) was an answer to this investigation of a machine forming its own relationship to context.

MAM implements a simplified conception of creativity proposed by Liane Gabora that emphasizes origination over evaluation. According to this theory, all the experiences of an agent are broken down into micro-features and encoded in memory. The 'world-view' is the whole collection of memories of a person, and they are organized in a structure that is unique to their life experience. Creativity is an association through this field of memories, where components of previous experiences are combined and new juxtapositions are formed. Rational and creative thought are two extremes of a single process. Rational associations involve activations of few memories in very focused directions, while creative associations involve the activation of many memories in many different directions. For more information on this see my M.Sc. Thesis. In order to continue my interest in origination, I'm moving away from creativity and looking at mental processes that may not involve any agency. My Ph.D. project is the development of a 'Dreaming Machine' that explicitly implements cognitively oriented models of concept generation, perception, memory and dreaming.

Creative machines are a way to test out theories of creativity, and could be used to validate certain models of cognitive processing. I'm not interested in using art to validate science, but interested in some mutual overlap between these areas. I believe that science is just another cultural practise. The use of scientific models is more about a better understanding of science than it is about a better understanding of 'makers'. To simply accept these models without critique is to accept the doctrine that only science can construct new knowledge, which I don't think is the case.

There are features regarding the study of creativity that are really interesting, and others than I find tiresome. It becomes very clear when looking at 'creativity' that one of the most imperative aspects is that of evaluation. Boden explicitly defines creativity as the construction of something (idea or artifact) that is new, surprising and valuable. This thinking permeates much work in metacreation, where some mechanism randomly creates variation, which is then edited down by a secondary process. Almost any process can create massive amounts of random variation and, according to this mindset, the process of evaluation becomes paramount. In computational systems much effort is put into the "fitness" and evaluation functions that allow a machine to decide what is worth keeping, and what is not. In order to design such algorithms one must build in a criteria for what is important in an idea or artifact. This cuts against my interest in origination because the problem moves from "lets build a machine that originates" to "lets determine a measure of creativity". I don't really care what relationship MAM will form with its context, what is important is the formation itself (or at least the effort in that direction) not the qualities of the relationship. I find the idea of formally encoding evaluation criteria quite unpleasant.

Perhaps it comes down to the AI debate between 'symbolic' and 'interactionist' poles. One side is 'top-down', where intelligence is considered a rational process that can be reduced to symbolic logic. For this side, evaluation is natural as it's a top-down process. On the other side we have a 'bottom-up' approach, where methods are often inspired by biological systems, for example artificial neural networks. Intelligence is an emergent property that arises from the interaction between an agent and its environment. In this case, evaluation does not explicitly exist, it too is emergent. The bottom line is that for something to be created it must first originate before it can be evaluated.

Creativity, for me, is really an exploration of the big project of AI: building machines that do things that we normally attribute to people. In looking at creativity I'm interested in rejecting the notion of rational intelligence and interested in mental processes that go beyond rationality. This also explains my interest in origination, which could be considered irrational, due to a potential lack of evaluation. Choices may not be made for an explicit reason, they could be random, they could be unintelligible, they could be insane. Evaluation, on the other hand, is extremely rational. In Boden's terms, it involves knowing what has happened before (to judge newness), what is normal (to judge surprise), and what is needed (to judge value).

[Self-Organized Landscape #32, University of Limerick: Study from Video]

MD: That's indeed a good point; but now I wonder: would you also attempt at mimicking or reconstituting human forgetfulness and fallacy in machines? I'm pointing at that obscure mental process which makes human beings forget or hide their memories, or even rebuild them, patch them together by deploying pretentious ambitions or delusional feelings. I believe such processes greatly affect human creativity by simultaneously creating grounds and expectations.

BB: Just today on the radio I heard a reference to a link between creative genius, irrationality and destructive behaviour. There has been a line of argument that creativity and insanity are related, but, as far as I understand, this argument depends on an extremely simplistic notion of creativity. Through the process of working on MAM, many interesting issues came up, the subtitle of my first publication on MAM (before it was even titled as such), "seizures, blindness and short-term memory", highlights the nature of the machine's disability. Early implementations of the free-associative system were very temperamental and often became over-activated, causing CPU spikes and lockups. It was Dr. Steven Barnes that made the connection between this behaviour and epilepsy. Blindness and short-term memory are fairly obvious limitations of the system. Forgetfulness seems fairly clear in a system with finite memory, humans and machines alike. In regards to fallacy, it seems to me that even the notion of human fallibility depends on the consideration of humans as rational creatures. A mistake requires some goal-oriented task. What if the machine does not have such a task, does it's fallibility have any significance?

In my background research for the current dreaming machine I came across this paper, "Toward Daydreaming Machines", which describes architectures that could give machines the ability to resolve cognitive tension by relegating facts and memories to their subconscious. I'm not so interested in these high level models of human cognition, but the aspect of illness and disability is interesting in the context of a cultural reflection: what is normal. Deaf and autistic cultures being examples of 'differences of ability' rather than disability. I think that creative ability likely brings to bare all aspects of cognition, including illness, inability and so on. Creativity is a function of the whole of the mind, as informed by the whole of a person's bodily experience in the world. Perhaps for a machine to be creative in a truly significant way, it would need to have an emotional base that drives an irrational process. Now we're back to the problem of origination. One theory of human emotion is that it is rooted in biological needs, as a machine is not biologically alive, its not clear what these needs would be. Machines are not designed to survive, certainly not on the scale that living things, at the level of species, do.

[Self-Organized Landscapes, Pixelache 2010]

MD: How would an 'intelligent' or 'creative' machine benefit from such intrinsic human traits? Would a machine benefit from it at all?

BB: It depends on the purpose of the machine. If it is meant to be a tool, a system that (creatively or through reasoned deduction) generates new artifacts/ideas, then those cognitive (dis)abilities related to managing cognitive dissonance would likely just get in the way. On the other hand, a machine with these traits could be a mirror through which we could reflect on ourselves. In general, the question of whether such traits would be a benefit depends on what function those traits have in living systems. It's possible they only have functions for survival.

MD: A machine as a techno-cultural mirror of our intellectual and emotional drifts. Sounds intriguing. Talking about science as a cultural practise, I seem to identify a convergent force which is moving a[…]

Cloo iPhone App Cloo
Running around a city trying to find a public bathroom/Starbucks/secluded alley is one of those moments that's an urban dweller's nightmare, and one that's guaranteed to happen several dozen times in real life. (Here we should add that New York, PopSci's hometown, is among the worst of the offenders.) Cloo (technically, "CLOO'", but, you know, we're not calling it that) is a new app for iOS that tries to solve that problem by connecting those in need with friends or friends of friends that are willing to supply their bathrooms--for a price.

Cloo, which very Britishly stands for Community Loo, is an app currently under development (as in, not yet available) which will show a Google Maps layer overlaid with locations of friends and friends of friends who have put their own private bathrooms, in their own homes, where they live, up for grabs. (Presumably, that "friends of friends" thing will be done through Facebook, though Cloo hasn't made that clear.)

There are a few higher-level ideas at work, like a payment system that works kind of like that Bump app (you tap two phones together to exchange data, or, in this case, currency) and some vaguely-defined partnerships with toilet-supply companies so you don't have to cut into your own profit to buy toilet paper or hire professional cleaners like you'll probably want to, every week.

The app isn't out yet, though you can follow the Cloo team's progress on Twitter. For now, it seems like the kind of idea that one side of the userbase (the side that has to pee, or poop, or whatever, no judgments here) would absolutely love, while the other side (the side with the bathroom) would be pretty leery about. At least we can be thankful the app doesn't have a urination-related pun as a name. (Though we would kind of love it if you guys contributed your own ideas in the comments.)

[Cloo]

Wire frame of the towers from Mr. August's Greenpoint rooftop.

For many of us, the Manhattan skyline is marked as much by absence as presence. Hanging out on his rooftop on Hope Street in Greenpoint, Brian August was trying to explain to a friend the void left behind, both in the mind and to the eye, by the loss of the Twin Towers.

There was some copper tubing lying around from an art project and Mr. August mocked up a simple sculpture to show a friend how the towers had appeared from that rooftop nine summers earlier. The finished product, a stark outline of the towers scaled to fit the skyline, struck Mr. August with a deep emotion.

“This really started ten years ago,” said Mr. August, a lifelong New Yorker. “I started thinking to to myself, how many people go about their routines in New York, and they get to a certain place where they always used to stop and look at the towers. What if you could give everyone this experience, and a way to share it with others.”

The result is 110 Stories, a mobile app Mr. August created for iPhone, and soon Android. Its purpose is simple, said Mr. August: orient, augment, comment.

Users open the app, which orients them to point their camera at where the towers would have been. When they snap a photo, the app augments the picture by sketching in how the towers would have appeared. Finally, it prompts them to comment on what that the resulting image means to them.

“I kept telling the developers, simpler, simpler,” said Mr. August. Instead of a cheesy pair of computer-generated towers, the app generates a haunting wireframe silhouette like the one Mr. August first created on that Greenpoint rooftop.

Augemented reality apps have a bad reputation, deservedly so. Most have been used for corny marketing campaigns or pretentious art projects. Mr. August’s app, with its simple, specific purpose, manages to offer an alternate snapshot of reality that is jarring and profound.

“It occcured to me that there is a whole generation growing up, and people who have never visited New York, who will have no conception of how big the towers were, how beautiful and how iconic, and all the different vantage points around New York where you could see them.”

While Mr. August has been thinking about this project for ten years, it was only in the last two months that he decided to throw everything he had behind making it a reality.

“You know, you reach a point when you’re obsessed with something, where you feel like its possible, and for me that was maybe two months ago, where this idea was just kind of cascading through my brain, I just said to myself, if you don’t do this, with the ten year anniversary coming up, you will be kicking yourself for the rest of your life.”

Mr. August put 110 Stories on Kickstarter in order to raise funds, eventually surpassing his goal and raising more than $27,000, meaning the app will be live on the iPhone in time for the anniversary. The normally verbose Mr. August recently released a video thanking everyone and expressing his sentiments with just three words. “We did it.”

Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder--it is also in the eyes of the beholder’s friends. A study published in April in Psychological Science found that men judge a woman as more attractive when they believe their peers find that woman attractive--supporting a budding theory that groupthink is not as simple as once thought.
Researchers at Harvard University asked 14 college-age men to rate the attractiveness of 180 female faces on a scale of 1 to 10. Thirty minutes later the psychologists asked the men to rate the faces again, but this time the faces were paired with a random rating that the scien­tists told the men were averages of their peers’ scores. The men were strongly influenced by their peers’ supposed judgments--they rated the women with higher scores as more attractive than they did the first time. Functional MRI scans showed that the men were not simply lying to fit in. Activity in their brain’s pleasure centers indicated that their opinions of the women’s beauty really did change.

From pheromones to disease detection via smell, or what your nose has to do with the neurochemistry of nostalgia.

Smell is often considered the most primal and most evocative of our senses. But how does it really work, and what exactly is its secret language? That’s exactly what Scents and Sensibilities explores — a fascinating 90-minute program from the World Science Festival, covering everything from pheromones to the smell of fear to how scent influences behavior to the incredible sentimental value of smells. The full program is now available online in its entirety, an absolute treat of fascination and self-knowledge.

Smell is the only human sense that brings floating molecules from our environment into direct contact with our neurons.”

Particularly intriguing is this segment by neuroscientist and olfactory researcher Leslie Vosshall on how smell actually works and the complex chemical interplay of scents:

Once you go beyond three [olfactory] components, people are completely stumped because the 400 receptors start interacting. It will be like A + B = Z, so a completely different precept emerges, which is why perfumery ends up being so empirical and so artistic. You can predict what you’ll get when you mix two colors, you actually can’t predict what will happen when you mix two smells.” ~ Leslie Vosshall

For more on this infinitely fascinating subject, see Avery Gilbert’s excellent What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life.

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Altruism by way of self-improvement, or what optimizing your workflow has to do with saving children.

This year, The Domino Project set out to change the future of publishing, and now it’s out to change the future of philanthropy. The project’s latest release, by author Michael Bungay Stanier of Box of Crayons fame, is out to tackle one of our civilization’s grimmest epidemics: malaria. (And if the gravity of the issue still hasn’t stopped you dead in your tracks — like, for instance, the fact that a child dies of malaria every 45 seconds — watch Bill Gates’ 2009 TED talk.)

End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life, released on End Malaria Day today, is a fantastic anthology that will save lives — by helping you be better, smarter, more efficient at your job. The book features essays, tips and insights on great work by 62 leading writers and thinkers — including Brain Pickings favorites Sir Ken Robinson, Brené Brown, Kevin Kelly, Scott Belsky, Barry Schwartz, Daniel Pink, Derek Sivers and more — with $20 out of every $25 book sale (that’s 80%, for the mathematically challenged) going to Malaria No More to buy mosquito nets for Africa, still the most effective malaria prevention method. (For comparison purposes, most product-based charitable contributions are in the 5-10% range.)

Divided into eight key areas of insight — including creating freedom, disrupting “normal,” and taking small steps — the essays range from the pithy to the profound, equal parts actionable blueprint for optimizing your own work and fascinating peek into the workflow and creative process of some of today’s most admired thinkers and doers.

We seek to substitute rules for discretion, scripts for imagination.” ~ Barry Schwartz

Beta is an act of transparency and an admission of humility.” ~ Jeff Jarvis

Wanting to do two non-compatible things has a name. It’s called stress.” ~ Seth Godin

End Malaria is an inspired effort to bridge the divide between selflessness and self-interest, inviting you to help eradicate both malaria and your own creative plateaus with something as humble yet potent as a book — what’s not to love?

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At first glance--and even after deep scrutiny--the names on a new memorial to those killed on September 11, 2001, seem randomly arrayed. The names are not arranged alphabetically nor, for the most part, are they presented in labeled groups. But the memorial's layout is anything but random.

Like buying and carrying Bezos' cash register for him Analysis  Amazon's first tablet, according to reports, is designed entirely around getting stuff from Amazon. The first hands-on (no pix) report indicates that it's a fork of Android, heavily customised to run a colour Kindle app – and provide access to Amazon's other services. Like the eInk Kindle, the all-colour Kindle tablet will be a shopping application in hardware.…

"Culturomics" is an emerging field of study into human culture that relies on the collection and analysis of large amounts of data. A previous culturomic research effort used Google's culturomic tool to examine a dataset made up of the text of about 5.2 million books to quantify cultural trends across seven languages and three centuries. Now a new research project has used a supercomputer to examine a dataset made up of a quarter-century of worldwide news coverage to forecast and visualize human behavior. Using the tone and location of news coverage, the research was able to retroactively predict the recent Arab Spring and successfully estimate the final location of Osama Bin Laden to within 200 km (124 miles)...
Continue Reading Culturomics research uses quarter-century of media coverage to forecast human behaviorSection: Research WatchTags: Behavior,
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Google Takeout, the recently launched “data liberation” service that lets you export files, photos and data from Google services like Picasa and Buzz, now includes support for Google Voice.
With the update, users of Google’s Internet-telephony service Google Voice are able to export call history, voicemail messages, greetings, call recordings, phone numbers and text messages…

For many [...]

Clostridium difficile Destroy too much beneficial gut bacteria with antibiotics, and this little bug takes over, causing what's known as Clostridium difficile disease. Marcus007 via Wikimedia
If you're one of those people worried that the over-prescription of antibiotics is leading us toward biological calamity, you're not going to like this. Writing in the journal Nature this week, Martin Blaser of NYU's Langone Medical Center makes the case that antibiotics aren't just leading to highly resistant superbugs, but that they are permanently altering our bacterial microbiomes, and not for the better.

Our microbiomes are the collection of bacterial microbes that we carry around with us all the time, those symbiotic little bugs that live on our skin and in our esophagi and--very importantly--in our guts. And while we've long known that a cycle of antibiotics prescribed to kill off an infection can also kill off some of our most important beneficial microorganisms, the general line of thinking is that once the cycle of antibiotics ends our microbiomes correct themselves and the natural order of things returns.

Blaser presents arguments otherwise in an editorial that suggests that our gut bacteria is permanently affected by a cycle of antibiotics, and that the impact is so profound that it might be time to seriously consider not giving antibiotics to anyone other than very young children and pregnant women. Quoted by Maryn McKenna in Wired:

Early evidence from my lab and others hints that, sometimes, our friendly flora never fully recover. These long-term changes to the beneficial bacteria within people's bodies may even increase our susceptibility to infections and disease. Overuse of antibiotics could be fueling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma, which have more than doubled in many populations.

He then goes on to present some disconcerting correlations between the absence of certain bacteria and the rise in incidences of things like allergy, asthma, and weight gain. He points to evidence that children are getting too many doses of antibiotics before adulthood and that their microbiomes are never the same for it--specifically that the damage to our gut bacteria populations is permanent from that point forward.

Which leads to an eventual conclusion that when our children are sick we shouldn't give them what we know will make them better. And that's a tough pill to swallow.

[Wired]

The Cardboard Cathedral Shigeru Ban Architects via Yahoo Real Estate
The Bible has at least a little to say about how to construct a building, but mostly in Proverbs and mostly not having anything to do actually building a structure (metaphor!). So without rock solid instructions, officials overseeing the Christchurch Cathedral--the one in Christchurch, New Zealand, that was all but leveled in February's 6.3-magnitude earthquake--plan to build a 700-seat cardboard cathedral as a temporary replacement.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is heading up the design effort, which is currently in the midst of a $50,000 feasibility study. If the plan is approved, Ban plans to erect a massive 78-foot-high A-frame cathedral from cardboard tubes that will sit upon a foundation of 20-foot shipping containers (and we're pretty positive that building plan is nowhere in the Good Book).

Don't be misled by the term "temporary." This structure is meant to serve as a stand-in for Christchurch Cathedral--the city's iconic landmark--for a full ten years. It will cost about $3.4 million and could be erected in as few as three months. And try not to associate cardboard with "temporary" either--Ban has been building cardboard structures since 1989 (including a church in Kobe, Japan and several temporary housing buildings in Haiti), and he builds them to last.

Known as an "emergency architect," Ban is a big proponent of cardboard as a building material, particularly after natural disasters when the prices of building materials spike. It's cheap and abundant, it recycles when you're done with it, and it's surprisingly strong. In a pinch, you can usually get your hands on a lot of it fast at low cost.

If the plan is approved, the cardboard cathedral may be swiftly built to open on Feb 22 of next year, the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. That means a lot of cardboard will have to be erected in quite a hurry. But it's silly to think of the strength of a building in terms of how much time you spend moving heavy materials into place, Ban says. After all, he said in remarks to Christchurch Cathedral officials, paper buildings don't collapse during an earthquake.

[Yahoo Real Estate]

September is back to school time, and also a good time to update your online resume and credentials. While a new Facebook app from Brazen Careerist is more about the eye candy than anything, there are a few nuggets of utility that are worth reviewing as you attempt to better market yourself and re-invigorate your job search.

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We all know that it isn't just about scanning Craigslist posts to find a job: part of the process is being able to put down all your skills and previous experiences in a way that will elicit a response from a potential future employer. And part of that is doing some careful soul-searching, reviewing your last resume, and keeping up to date what you have down in your LinkedIn and Facebook and other online profiles as your work experience changes, or as you recall things that you omitted the last time you went through this exercise.

I have done dozens of training seminars for potential job seekers over the past several years, and one thing that I emphasize repeatedly is that you need to do these reviews and updates on a regular basis. If you are currently unemployed, it should be weekly. Otherwise, monthly is fine. I have had a Linked In account for many years, and I still find annoying typos and mistakes and omissions every time I go back and edit my profile. It is just human nature: we aren't good at copy editing ourselves, and we tend to forget significant events, people, and work moments as we are staring at the screen trying to recall what was that big report that I worked on back in 2003?

So enter Brazen Careerist. The company offers a variety of helpful tools, videos and online events primarily for Gen Y'ers looking for employment. We last wrote about them last November. I have not used any of their other tools besides the new Facebook app, which was announced today.

So after you link the app to your Facebook account, the next thing you'll need to do is link it to your LinkedIn account. It then assembles a visual "infographic" style resume that is more flash than substance. For example, you get this map of your connections (I don't know what that dot is just south of Maine, I don't think I have a cluster of lobster fishermen or whatever that is out there in the ocean).

There is also a listing of keywords for your skills that it culls from your job descriptions. Now I am notoriously bad at figuring this out, so one asset for the Brazen app is that it just did this for me. I can now go back into LinkedIn, and update its recently added skills section for my profile. Yeah! (You do know that the skills section is the single most-important part of your resume and something that should be placed at the very top, right?)

The other interesting part of the app is its badges display, as you can see below. I got 11 out of the 24 possible badges, and some of them are obvious - I know a lot of CEOs, so the CEO in training badge makes sense. But others are just plain wrong: as an avid reader, I just don't have time to list all the books that I read online, or indeed any of them. So the "book nerd" badge isn't lit up yet. Still, this got me thinking about how I can better show my talents and tweak my profile. And even though it is a Facebook app, most of the data points it is using (at least for me) are from my LinkedIn account. And no, there isn't any badge for the number of pictures of you with red plastic cups in your hands.

There are other social networking aspects of Brazen that I don't think will catch on: do we really need another social networking app to invite friends and follow others? I don't think so. But if you can use the app to help you spruce up your LinkedIn profile, that is a big plus. The app is free and it will take just a few minutes to see the kind of results that I show here.

Discuss

There’s been a lot written recently about the issue of online anonymity, and in particular how Google believes that a “real names” policy is necessary so that the Google+ network maintains a certain tone and level of trust. We’ve talked at GigaOM about ways in which Google could allow anonymity (or pseudonymity) and still maintain a healthy community, but media analyst Ken Doctor has put his finger on another option — one that some news outlets are experimenting with — and that’s “gamification,” or rewards for reader behavior and engagement. If Google is serious about creating an actual community on Google+, it’s an idea worth thinking about.

Despite a torrent of criticism from users and anonymity advocates such as sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd — who argues that Google’s real-name policy is “an abuse of power” in favor of a privileged few — the search giant seems determined not to budge on its requirement. In a recent interview in Edinburgh, Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt argued that the Internet as a whole would be better off if real names were the norm, and also made what appeared to be a case for Google+ becoming an “identity service” that the company could build other services upon.

As we’ve argued in the past, there are substantial benefits to allowing anonymity or what some call “persistent pseudonyms,” including the fact that this enables those with unpopular or even politically dangerous views to use such networks, as NPR journalist Andy Carvin notes in a recent interview about his use of Twitter and Facebook. But whenever the issue of anonymity comes up, advocates say that anonymous comments allow trolling, flame-wars and other offensive behavior — an argument Financial Times columnist John Gapper made a few days ago in defending Google’s real-name policy.

Gamification as a way to build engagement
Could “gamification” help solve this problem? The concept has gotten its own share of criticism over the past year or so, since it has become a trendy buzzword and a popular idea with marketing agencies — and in many cases, simply adding badges to an existing service doesn’t really accomplish much. But as Ken Doctor notes in a post about how some news sites are using a gamification-style approach to improve reader comments, the idea has some merit when it is part of a broader outreach program. Says Doctor:

The goal here isn’t simply to build core customers. It’s to bring greater civility and perspective — what Lyons calls “insight” — to the site. Readers now can mark others’ comments as “insightful,” resulting, over time, in higher ranking of commenters the community seems to value.

The site Doctor describes (Redding.com, run by the newspaper in Redding, Calif.) isn’t the only news outlet to experiment with reader badges and other reward programs as a way of influencing behavior: the Huffington Post launched reader badges last year, and although it hasn’t released any specific numbers about the effect on traffic or comments, the site’s former social-media editor Adam Clarke Estes told me the program was seen as a success both in terms of traffic and its impact on behavior.

It’s not so much that badges or other rewards — Slashdot, a pioneering geek community, has long used “karma points” as a way of rewarding users and selecting moderators — cure bad behavior, or prevent trolls from coming to a site. What they do instead is make it easier to distinguish between what Slashdot calls “anonymous cowards” and those who have gained the trust of the community. Over time, it becomes obvious (theoretically) who is worth listening to and who isn’t (Jeff Sonderman at Poynter has also written about the advantages of reader badges for news sites).

Levelling up is an investment users make
When I tried to describe this idea to a marketing person at the newspaper I used to work for, I had a hard time getting it across — until her young colleague said “you mean readers could level up, just like in World of Warcraft!” And he was right: The whole concept of “gamification,” whether it involves badges or points or other features (extra powers as a commenter, added profile enhancements, etc.) is designed as an incentive for engagement, just as the ability to add new armor or spells is in World of Warcraft.

That’s not to say that “griefing” or other kinds of bad behavior don’t occur in online games or other communities with game-style rewards. But the odds are somewhat lower, simply because users don’t want to jeopardize their standing in that community. I remember a friend agonizing over quitting World of Warcraft because he had spent thousands of hours getting his avatar to a certain level of experience — it was a huge investment, and he would have done anything not to endanger that, even though his real name didn’t appear anywhere on his gamer profile.

There are some key differences between World of Warcraft and newspaper comment sections, of course, and between online games and what Google is trying to create with Google+ (which may just be a way to connect people to other Google services and improve search results, rather than creating a real community). No one pays to be a member of either a newspaper comment section or Google+, and not many spend thousands of hours in these communities the way they do with WoW.

But Google and other companies still might be able to take advantage of those kinds of incentives, as Redding.com is with its experimental program. Instead of simply trying to ban or exclude anyone who doesn’t want to use a real name, as Google is doing with Google+, why not try to design a system that rewards the type of behavior you want to see, and lets the users of that community decide who they wish to pay attention to?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Torley

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news contentFlash analysis: prospects for Google+Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

From London to the Middle East riots have shaken political stability.

MIT researchers tested the ’sensing skin’ by attaching it to the underside of a concrete beam, then applying enough force to cause tiny cracks to form in the beam under one patch of the skin.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in 2009,  assigned a grade of “D” to the overall quality of infrastructure in [...]

Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

What made the Internet, and thus the Web, possible - the thing that, without which, Tim Berners-Lee would still be watching reruns of "Eastenders" - was a decision. The major carriers of electronic mail, whose business it had become to route messages to each other's members, collectively reached a truce. They decided that the long, endless fight over who has the biggest volume, the longest distance, the fastest network, so that one could charge the others more postage than it was being charged, was too expensive and was stifling progress. They decided to call off the war. I know. I was on the phone with them the moment it happened.

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The boldest stroke of all

The date was April 25, 1990. My assignment was a story on the subject of universal e-mail addresses - the notion that someone could have an address that is independent of CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, or Prodigy. The protocol these addresses were based upon was an international standard called X.400. That standard not only specified what we now call the "domain" for each e-mail recipient, but also the manifest for the settlements of any charges between one carrier, such as GE Information services, and another to which it might hand off the message, such as MCI Mail.

I asked one of GE's lead engineers, Kenneth Murphy, how X.400 made sense of all the various exchanges an e-mail had to make on its way to its recipient. To my astonishment, Murphy explained that, if the meeting going on that day was successful, X.400 would not even be necessary.

Here is how I presented the story for the May 1990 issue of one of those printed computer magazines that is now the stuff of landfills:

The way the structure is being developed, an E-mail message is, to some extent, a property of the service on which it was composed; it will then be bought, under contractual arrangement, by whatever service the recipient chooses for reading that message. The legal issues are rather complex, so I'll let Kenneth Murphy elaborate: "Let's put some real names to this - I'm going to use AT&T [as merely one example]. AT&T Mail and GE Information Services have negotiated an interconnection agreement, which was announced last Monday [23 April]; it means all of their subscribers can send and receive messages to and from all of our subscribers. I haven't a clue what an AT&T Mail user enters at the 'To?>' prompt, in whatever front-end they've got; but presumably, they should be able to address me or any of our other subscribers without too much difficulty, as long as they know the correct way to format the address. They will pay AT&T Mail charges, whatever they may be. I, as GE Information Services, will deliver what's handed off to me, to my subscriber free of charge.

"Today, there's a concept of Settlement of Accounts. The interconnect agreement is a legal, contractual document between the two of us. It covers a lot of stuff, but one thing it specifically does not cover - and this is temporary - is the issue of settlement. Settlement means, I want reimbursement for my cost of delivering a message to my subscriber on your behalf, you being AT&T. Therefore, we need to finish this process and agree on some monetary values for messages, and then we just keep track of those accounts, and at the end of a period of months/quarter/year, we will settle the difference. That is a process that has long been in place for the interconnected postal services, telex networks, telephone networks, public data networks."

...

Since there will only be a handful of E-mail services, they may all decide to settle accounts with each other just as GE has with AT&T; so every E-mail provider will be connected to every other - what then? X.25 [the international standard at the time for packet-form communication] will make it possible for a user to make connections with more than one service; but if all of them are interconnected anyway, why should she want to? These are unresolved questions.

In fact, at the very minute Ken Murphy and I were talking, an international meeting was taking place regarding these very issues. Murphy told me, "There's a meeting going on today [25 April 1990] up in New Jersey where the service providers of North America are trying to grapple with the problems, both technical and commercial, of implementing interconnected directory services using the X.500 standard. It's not going to be easy. Also, there is going to be a meeting in two weeks of the North American service providers, working with the Electronic Mail Association. It's a working meeting of editors to sit down and publish a user guide that can be distributed throughout the marketplace, on how the heck you get from one system to another, now that these systems are interconnected. What I see at the 'To?>' prompt is going to be very different from whatever you see, unless we're on the identical system. If we're on the identical system, we don't need X.400."

Nothing we do on the Internet today would have been conceivable, let alone feasible, had these corporations never decided amongst themselves, "You know what, the heck with it." HTTP protocol could be developed because there was no longer any need for a settlement of accounts, or a protocol to keep track of such a settlement.

Nobody thanks GE, MCI, Sprintnet, UUnet, and the other names from another era buried in the rubble of our selective history, for the one bold stroke of sensibility that inevitably transformed our world. Every innovation brought forth since that time, including the one with the hyperlink thingie, resulted not so much from inventors or business titans or shrewd negotiators but from battle-weary pragmatists. They knew the real revenue would eventually come from the cavalcade of new services enabled by a unified digital communications platform, and dickering about how the seams should be sewn was trite. It was the best decision to quit ever made.

The long, grueling road to par

Today, we stand at a similar precipice of history. There are a handful of wireless carriers, a handful of Internet search providers, a handful of device manufacturers, a handful of technology portfolio managers. Each of them has the keys to something about the Internet that all of them require to run their business. The potential in front of them is an all-inclusive service of unlimited media from multiple sources: the world stage in one's pocket.

Yet rather than decide it'll all come out in the wash, each player tries to amass more intellectual property than another, driving up the value of their patents. Google buys Motorola because it couldn't buy Nortel, and someone may yet buy InterDigital, maybe to keep it away from Qualcomm, etc. The objective of this game is for one player to be paid the most penance and crowned king - an endgame that never comes.

An agreement between these parties on the order of the e-mail services agreement that forged the modern Internet, is impossible. The reasons why are in front of our faces:

1. Egos. The major players have become like sports teams. They're in front of the spotlight all the time, and we, the people, follow their moves and even place bets on them. Like pro wrestling sometimes, certain players wear the villain's hood, and others the gold belt of champions. We consumers have our emotions vested in this battle to a greater extent than before. In so doing, we've inflated the egos of the people in charge. They don't want to let us down. We've seen what happens when competitors reach covenants with one another (Microsoft + Novell, Microsoft + Sun). Covenants, some claim, are cloaked conspiracies to defraud consumers. (Everything, some claim, is a cloaked conspiracy to defraud consumers.)

2. Lack of faith. No one is certain any more of the potential value of the future services that the expansion of wireless Internet platforms may yet provide. Today's services appear to be undermining the foundations of many once-formidable industries - recording, publishing, news-gathering, advertising, porn. Not only is there no guarantee of a brighter future for content any more, there's no clear sign of it. Those whose futures are completely tied up in content are forging business models based on sci-fi constructs like content farms and self-repurposing. So there's no incentive for corporations to forfeit their revenue from licensing, in hopes of competing in media.

3. Debt. The cost of having built the telecommunications infrastructure that's already in place, will probably never be recouped from consumer services alone. It costs carriers such as Verizon as much as $4,000 per customer to deploy services from which they may expect to see, over their service lifetime, about $1,500. Consumers are not willing to pay what the Internet actually costs. Thus carriers must recoup their investment elsewhere, and licensing - with the litigation that comes with it - is the most convenient alternative.

Assuming that every merger and acquisition that could ever be made has been made, and every intellectual property infringement and licensing disagreement lawsuit that can be pursued has been pursued, the eventual outcome is exactly the same as the one the e-mail engineers foresaw back in 1990. It can be described with one of the simplest words ever given to English by the Latin language: par. That these unknown and, as yet, unheralded people could foresee this simple truth and their successors are blind to it, says everything about the history of technology in the last 21 years that anyone needs to know.

[…]

B.F. Skinner, the great 20th century psychologist and social philosopher, had an idea about how to bring about world peace. It involved teaching pigeons to guide missiles.

Skinner isn’t the big name today that he was in the middle 20th century. He was a Harvard professor then, a pioneer of the study of behaviorism. But he was also a gifted animal trainer. By day, in his lab, he worked out the fastest ways to train rats and pigeons to pull levers and push buttons. By night, he trained his children’s kittens to play the piano. He taught the family beagle hide and seek.

An advocate of positive reinforcement training, he focused on rewarding behaviors that he wanted; by calculating what is rewarding to an animal and then doling out and withholding reward strategically, it’s possible to coax an endless array of behaviors without any kind of force. It’s a method of animal training that has long been used by marine animal trainers who work with creatures that are too big and powerful to be easily coerced with punishment. Today, most positive reinforcement dog training is done using a clicker, which is a handheld noise maker, or some other signal that’s been repeatedly paired with a reward. I train dogs by using the sharp clicking noise to pinpoint the moment that something has been done correctly. The noise is always backed up with a reward, just like a poker chip has meaning because it can always be cashed in for a dollar amount. Desired behaviors are positively reinforced; non-reinforced responses tend to go away, just like you’d probably stop showing up at work if your paychecks were cut off.

The word “positive” simply means that something is added to the equation. It has nothing to do with keeping a good attitude. Indeed, it has nothing to do with actual good doing. Jesus used positive reinforcement to influence people, but so did Hitler.

In the 1930s, when B.F. Skinner first started outlining the workings of this kind of conditioning, he founded a school of philosophy called Radical Behaviorism. At its foundation it’s the idea that it is easier to manipulate surroundings in order to control how we will behave than it is to try to peer inside the brain and psychoanalyze in order to affect change in ourselves or others. It’s about looking outward, not inward, to solve problems. In his science fiction novel Walden Two, Skinner produced a template for how to create a small utopian community governed by behaviorists implementing the methods of positive reinforcement. Critics called it “fascism without tears.” Others compared his community to a really big dog obedience class.

People were scared because the implications of manipulating people through conditioning meant bad things for the American idea of free will. No one wants to think they’re easily manipulated. But we are. Sure, we all make choices, but those choices are usually made because they’ve been reinforced in some way, or because it’s a choice that will avoid punishment. We’re always going towards what feels good. By controlling the outcomes of people’s behaviors through calculated reinforcement, Skinner believed people could be helped to live happier, safer, healthier lives.

PIGEONS LEARN JUST LIKE WE DO
In Skinner’s perfect world, war would be unnecessary. But his ideas about using positive reinforcement to manipulate people in order to levy world peace were largely dismissed when he first voiced them in the early 1940s. There were some factions of individuals who attempted to build their own Walden Twos, but the government wasn’t offering them subsidies. However, when the young professor suggested that positive reinforcement could be used to train pigeons to guide missiles, the National Defense Research Committee took notice.

The three screens of the pigeon missile nose cone. A pigeon was placed behind each screen
With the aforementioned clicker system now widely used to train dogs, Skinner taught pigeons to peck at a small, moving point placed under a glass screen. He suggested that the birds could be put in missiles with a screen inside; a distant enemy plane would look like a speck on the glass, and would cause the birds to peck. The movement of their necks could then be translated into navigational directions for the missiles. As long as their pecks stayed in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight; off-center pecks would cause the screen to tilt, which would then cause the missile to change course. If properly trained, the birds could aim at their targets with machine-like precision, even if exposed to extreme noise or atmospheric pressure.

While working on the secretive Project Pigeon (later called Project Orcon, for “organic control”), Skinner taught pigeons to reliably peck at a spot – one bird was trained to peck at an image more than 10,000 times in 45 minutes – but that was the least of his feats. He trained them to read, hit ping-pong balls, and play the piano. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the NDRC contracted General Mills to work on the idea with Skinner, but while they contributed $25,000 to the research, they neglected to give Skinner’s team any sample target images or specifications about what kind of missile or pigeon carriers would be used. In short, the humans screwed up.

Skinner’s biographer Daniel Bjork notes that the failure of Project Pigeon was likely linked to the fact that it was happening concurrently with the Manhattan Project; compared to the power of a potential nuclear weapon, animal-led warfare seemed anachronistic and silly. The kamikaze pigeons never flew. Instead, we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Today, several Skinner disciples teach periodic workshops to demonstrate the power of operant conditioning by showing people how to “clicker train” a chicken to peck at a spot. Here, a chicken has just been taught to differentiate between two shapes

Connections

Surveillance Pigeon Invades Netherlands
Roaches Make Better Robots
You Can’t Mess With The Musk Ox

You probably have never heard of Dieter Rams (pictured at left) but certainly know of his work. For many years he was a product designer for Braun and other German companies. Back before Frog and Apple put the "i" in many of its products Braun was selling very elegant items that were well designed, such as calculators, shavers and household appliances. Many of these items can be found in museum collections all over the world today. Rams has had several design shows over the years and is known for his ten principles of "good design," and I thought if we substitute the word "code" for "design" that there is a lot software developers could learn from his principles too. Here they are, with some of my comments.

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Good code is innovative.
 One of the exciting things about working in the tech industry is that we still have plenty of innovation each and every day. And the best coding takes advantage of this innovation and wows us.

Good code makes an app useful
. This seems fairly obvious. We buy or download apps to use them, just like products. But the best apps carry code that can showcase their use and avoid distractions.

Good code is aesthetic.
 Some IDEs can turn code into quite elegant arrangements that could almost hang on your wall, they are so attractive. But understanding the aesthetic of what your code does is also important. In the design world, aesthetic is very important because it is reflected in the products we use. Just look at the crowds inside your average Apple store and how things are laid out, and contrast that with the aesthetic, if you can find it, in your average Best Buy. No comparison.

Good code helps us to understand an app. And bad code helps us to see a badly designed app too.
Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to better is almost always different.
- Dieter Rams, 1993

Good code is unobtrusive. Perhaps this talks more about the resulting UI than the actual code itself. But it could also refer to the ability to easily read someone else's code too. Certainly this is the case for open software.

Good code is honest
. No tricks, no hidden trap doors, no malware needed. And no false advertising either: the code is the core essence of an app, nothing more, nothing less.

Good code is long-lasting.
 Some of the best software programs have been around for decades. They don't go out of style, just like well-designed products.

Good code is thorough, down to the last detail
 Squash those bugs! Find those corner cases! Test and retest with different browsers and environments. Don't leave anything to chance.

Good code is concerned with the environment.
 Again, somewhat obvious.

Good code is as little code as possible. Sadly, we have moved away from this tenet over the years, look how bloated our operating systems have gotten. I remember the early days when APL was considered the ultimate in coding - a single line could pack a ton of programming horsepower. You needed a special keyboard to code in it:

If you want to see some of Ram's work, go here.

Discuss

Despite his rakish appearance, garrulous talk and intense enthusiasm for the Web, Henry Lane Fox has always been something of a quiet man on the U.K.’s Internet scene. Perhaps it’s no surprise since he has long lived in the shadow of his sister, Martha, who made her name as the head of Lastminute.com — probably the most famous British company to emerge from the dot-com bubble.

Yet while Henry may be less well-known, he was also a co-founder of the site, although he quit about six months after the business had floated. He later went on to try his hand at other businesses, from the glamorous world of champagne bars in London to the decidedly less bubbly realm of manufacturing.

Now he’s having another go at being an Internet mogul as the CEO of The Browser, a site that offers links to a wide variety of writing around the Internet.

Curation for the curious?
The Browser says its aim is “to help our readers discover the best writing.” While Lane Fox is not a fan of the term “curation”, he admits that it is the current buzzword that best explains what the site does: find and aggregate links to interesting stories online, with a fairly high-minded tone.

“The challenge for us is to get a manageable reading list that will appeal to the intellectually curious,” he explains when we meet in his office, squirreled away in the upper reaches of a building in the very center of London. It’s about “trying to find the best writing across a range of subjects”.

Each day is spent finding good material. Today’s recommended reads, for example, include an essay on income inequality in India from Guernica magazine, and an opinionated piece on the use of torture by British and American military that ran in the U.K. Independent. It’s a varied bag.

Indeed, in the room next to us, the site’s small staff is sifting through the pile of recommendations, tips and finds that they build up during the day. The team, led by Bob Trevelyan, a former BBC editor, uses a variety of technologies to narrow down their vast selection of possible articles to a couple of hundred stories each day before going and taking a closer look.

“The key is then that they are read by somebody,” says Lane Fox. But aside from excellence, there is no other bar. “We don’t take the Longreads long-form view that something has to be 1500-plus words to be worth reading. We just really focus on quality.”

Henry was brought in to run things last year at the behest of the site’s main investor, Al Breach.

He inherited a site that was trying to amalgamate two different identities under one roof, both of them too narrow to be profitable. There was The Browser itself, which was well-liked by a small portion of the American intelligentsia (“a loyal, quite academic audience,” he says, who had a tendency to like “tough” material). And then there was the small literary interview site FiveBooks, which encourages well-known thinkers to share their thoughts on their favorite books.

“[The Browser] got this niche audience quite early on; it launched in 2009 and was picked up quite quickly by David Brooks at the New York Times, so that gave it a nice spike in traffic,” says Lane Fox.

But when he arrived, he “looked at the site and it was growing, but had sort of reached a plateau. FiveBooks had been set up in the meantime… and it had a very up and down period. It was quite difficult to see how it was going to monetize itself.”

The idea was to bring the two together to build a destination site that generated its own material, linked to others and simply built an audience by recommending great reading. Bringing the two together has worked so far, with unique user numbers rising to 250,000 per month (around 50,000 are dedicated readers, he says) and more on the way.

Expansion plans include turning more passers-by into hardcore fans, as well as stepping away from text and into multimedia.

The site plans to extend into “videos, photo-essays, different kinds of content. We don’t necessarily want to restrict ourselves… it would be easy to get caught in a niche business, and I’ve seen that happen to a lot of people online.”

Even in this broad sphere, though, The Browser is not without competition — indeed, its strategy is somewhat reminiscent of what The Atlantic is doing with its Atlantic Wire, video curation and photo collation.

‘We’re quite prepared to say there’s a cost to what we do’
The big question, though, remains: Can curation be a serious business?

Lane Fox says yes, because it’s useful for everyone: readers who get to find more material, publishers who get more targeted traffic and advertisers who know they’re talking to a high-level audience. But it’s not just an advertising play; he’s also not scared of asking readers to pay when the time is right — for example, when the site releases a subscription app for the iPad, which is coming soon.

“We’re quite prepared to say there’s a cost to what we do, so let’s say we’re going to charge you for it. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable situation to put ourselves in,” he says. “In a way, it’s a similar model to Instapaper, who I think took a great decision to stand up and say, ‘We’re a small company, we need to be funded, you have to pay for what we do because it’s good.’ They are going to be monthly subscriptions at a very low cost, hopefully 69 pence a month will be an easy purchase to swallow.”

But it’s not necessarily so simple. The financial side of app subscriptions are a big deal right now, most notably when the Financial Times recently removed its apps from iOS App Store in a long-running argument about Apple’s share of subscription revenue. The Browser doesn’t have those disagreements, says Lane Fox — not least because it’s a smaller concern.

“It’s a slightly false argument sometimes to look at this and say Apple’s being greedy and stealing 30 percent of the cash. In the end, that’s not an audience you have, and it’s not a platform you have access to. You have to take quite a long-term, big-picture view of it.”

That is not to say he is entirely satisfied. In fact, the company spent a long time last year building technologies to help magazine publishers make revenues, presumably without involving Apple. It turned into a dead end, but one that may arise again in the future.

“It’s extremely difficult to build consensus right now in the publishing industry — and it’s not a problem that we alone have, it goes for everybody from Google to Flipboard to ourselves,” he says. “That was the biggest challenge we faced last year, because I thought we could crack it, and I’m still ambitious that in the long run that it could be very valuable.”

In the meantime, trying to solve an impossible conundrum looks like little more than an easy way to get sidetracked — and today, Lane Fox says his most important task is simply to keep growing The Browser’s audience.

“From our side, the key right now is to build the business as fast as we can. We’ve got money for another year, and we’re trying to do some clever marketing deals,” he says. “Right now I think our challenge is, quite frankly, getting the word out to as many people as fast as possible, and finding a very clear way to describe what we do.”

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Steve Jobs and a host of computer pioneers believed LSD helped their creativity – but coincidence does not imply causality
" … in terms of our view of the universe – or my view of the universe – perception can be more powerful than physics can be."

You might be excused for thinking these are the words of a philosopher or a stoned Grateful Dead fan, but no. It's from an interview in 2000 with Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy and Britain's first software billionaire, currently in the process of selling his company to Hewlett-Packard for $10bn (£6bn). Lynch, who was talking about the power of the pattern recognition that forms the basis of Autonomy's success, went on to talk about the fascination of dreams, near-death experiences and the accounts of those experimenting scientifically with LSD in the 1960s: all forms of altered perception.

Did psychedelic drugs play a substantive role in the development of personal computing? In 2009, Ryan Grim, as part of publicising his book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America wrote a piece for the Huffington Post that made public a letter from LSD inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007 asking for funding for research into the use of psychedelics to help relieve the anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.

He picked Jobs because, as New York Times reporter John Markoff told the world in his 2005 book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, Jobs believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he'd done in his life. That 2001 conversation inspired Markoff to write the book: a history of computing with the drugs kept in.

From 1961 to 1965, the Bay Area-based International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through acid trips for research purposes. Some of them were important pioneers in the development of computing, such as Doug Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse, then heading a project to use computers to augment the human mind at nearby SRI. Grim also names the inventors of virtual reality and early Cisco employee Kevin Herbert as examples of experimenters with acid, and calls Burning Man (whose frequent attendees include Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) the modern equivalent for those seeking mind expansion.

There's a delicious irony in thinking that the same American companies who require their employees to pee in a cup rely on machines that were created by drugged-out hippies. But things aren't so simple. Markoff traces modern computing to two sources. First is the clean-cut, military-style, suit-wearing Big Iron approach of the east coast that, in its IBM incarnation, was so memorably smashed in the 1984 Super Bowl ad for the first Apple Mac.

Second is the eclectic and iconoclastic mix of hackers, hippies, and rebels of the west coast, from whose ranks so many of today's big Silicon Valley names emerged. Markoff, born and bred in the Bay Area and 18 in 1967, argues the idea of the personal computer as a device to empower individuals was a purely west coast idea; the east coast didn't "get" anything but corporate technology.

There's a basic principle to invoke here: coincidence does not imply causality. As early Sun employee John Gilmore, whom Grim calls a "well-known psychonaut", says in that article, it is very difficult to prove that drug use led directly to personal computers. The 1960s were a time of extreme upheaval: the Vietnam war and the draft, the advent of female-controlled contraception, and the campaign for civil rights all contributed to the counterculture. Was it the sex, the drugs or the rock'n'roll – or the science fiction?

In 1998 Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, said in a discussion of his enjoyment of science fiction: "I think it's also made it easier for me to think about things that weren't quite ready yet but I could imagine might just possibly be feasible."

Annie Gottlieb, in Do You Believe in Magic? Bringing the 60s Back Home, recounts the personal exploratory experiences of a variety of interviewees, and comes to this conclusion: "Any drug experience is determined far less by the drug than by what we bring to it." Many people tried acid. Only one became Steve Jobs.
ComputingDrugsSteve JobsAppleWendy M Grossmanguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Circadian rhythms are a roughly 24-hour cycle governing biochemical, physiological, or behavioral processes that have been widely observed not only in humans, but other animals, fungi, cyanobacteria and plants. In plants, circadian rhythms help synchronize biological processes with day and night to control photosynthesis, tell the plant what season it is, and the best time to flower to attract insects. Yale University researchers have now identified a key genetic gear that keeps the circadian clock in plants ticking, offering the prospect of engineering plants that can grow all year round and in locations where that's is not currently possible...
Continue Reading Manipulating plants' internal clock offers possibility of all-season cropsSection: Research WatchTags: Circadian Rhythms,
Crops,
Plants,
Yale

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Cell phone data plan policies and pricing aren't keeping with the times. In homes with multiple smartphones, tablets and people, providers need to create plans that are complimentary to their customers' needs. Clearly the data plan needs to evolve. We asked you, what advice would you give to providers?

You answered and we culled your responses and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

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View "What advice would you give to providers?" on Storify

Discuss

Remember this day, friends. Remember when the cyborg beetles early first took flight in our labs and flew right into their world domination destiny. Look! Even now one of the brood is stealing a quarter, no doubt for financing purposes.
But total world domination won’t happen just yet. First, their human scientist handlers must perfect the [...]

Is this what our future will look like?
John Schwartz has a nice piece in today’s New York Times on science fiction as a tool for predicting the future:
The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting that things will get worse. But while avoiding the nihilism of novels like [...]

For many people, a key part of their personal health management routine involves monitoring their blood pressure and weight. Frequently going to get one’s blood pressure measured at a pharmacy or clinic, however, can be a hassle. Well, to paraphrase an advertising slogan, “there’s an app for that” – along with a device. The iHealth Blood Pressure Monitoring System for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad consists of a blood pressure arm cuff wired to a portable dock, along with the free iHealth app, which users run on their chosen iDevice to keep track of their systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate. They will also soon be able to throw their weight data into the mix, with the iHealth Scale...
Continue Reading iHealth helps manage your blood pressure and weight on your iPhoneSection: Health and WellbeingTags: Blood Pressure,
Health,
IFA 2011,
iPad,
iPhone,
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Scales,
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Call For Entries #4: Glitch v. Scratch
Deadline: September 10th 2011
Screening: TBA (Late September, Early October)

The MisALT Screening Series is currently accepting submissions for it’s next screening: “Scratch v. Glitch.” We seek to create a dialog between Scratch Cinema (film based practices that make physical interventions on the celluloid level) and Glitch based video and media practices (which manipulate images by exploiting vulnerabilities on the molecular and electron level of video tape and code). While on the surface these practices appear contradictory, with one being concentrating on the materiality of film and the other focusing on the malleability of data they both share a concern with manipulating their respective mediums on what is arguably their basest level.

We are primarily interested in short to mid-length works (0-45minutes) but will consider work of longer durations and we are currently capable of exhibiting pieces on DVD, VHS, Super-8mm, 8mm, 16mm, or as digital files.

To submit please fill out the submission form (available at http://www.othervixen.com/misaltsub.html) and either send it along with a preview DVD, artist statement, and project description to:
MisALT Screening Series
c/o Tessa Siddle
738 Andover St.
San Francisco, CA
94110
Or E-mail the submission form, statement, description, and a link to a full version of the submission with the subject line “Glitch v. Scratch” to:
tess@othervixen.com

Tour of the history of the Brooklyn Bridge

Smartphone-toting history geeks like myself have probably noticed that apps for uploading geo-tagged historical photos to a map is a popular idea right now. History Pin, the Google-backed non-profit, and What Was There both launched recently with similar ideas: Use the ubiquity of mobile devices to teach people about how the world around them looked in the past. Think of Rama as that, but with a curated historical narrative, and a revenue-making model.

As cool as some of us might find seeing pictures on our smartphone of, say, what San Francisco City Hall looked like right after the 1906 earthquake when we’re standing right in front of the gleaming building in the city’s Civic Center, Michael Carroll decided it was much more useful to also explain all the related historical events and context of why, for instance, some buildings were damaged more than others, and why a massive fire broke out.

So he went and built an app (that’s free in the iOS App Store) that has historical background info and photos on an interactive mobile map. They’re divided into tours (starting at 99 cents) that can be submitted by anyone, but fact-checked and edited by Rama.

“About 70 percent of our tours are written by people that submitted stuff,” Carroll says. What he sees as the differentiating factor of his app versus other crowdsourced historical apps is, “We review the core ideas [of a tour] to see if it’s something that’s an interesting historical story. It can’t just be the history of this [random] street. It has to have a narrative to focus to it that makes it intriguing.”

He also tries to keep the tours’ appeal broad, like “Artistic Paris of the 1900s,” which is a guide to hotspots and meaningful locations visited by the American expat community of the early 20th century — think Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, etc. — around Paris, complete with geotagged photos and the stories behind them. There are also guides for major cities like New York City, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Rome, Athens, Cairo, London and more. They usually revolve around a theme: Revolutionary Cairo, Plague of London, 1930s Bangkok, Abe Lincoln’s Washington, D.C., Revolutionary Philadelphia, and so on.

After Apple takes its share of the in-app purchases of tours through Rama, Brooklyn-based parent company Bamboo Crimson splits the revenues from the tours sold with their creators. Carroll has no plans to offer ads right now. It’s a pretty spare operation the company’s got going: Carroll is one of two founders behind Crimson Bamboo, and he and co-founder Ivy Wu bootstrapped the company. They outsource at least some of their development overseas and do the curating of tours themselves.

The app is iPhone-only for now, but they plan to offer an Android version sometime next year. Also soon to come is the ability to do offline tours when Wi-Fi or 3G is not available. I happen to love this idea because it’s cheap and is a great way of using widely available devices to teach people about the past. Plus, travelers can skip the tour bus/duckboat.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Marcin Wichary

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Renowned New York Gallery owner Murray Moss has collaborated with .MGX and Materialise in the creation of the first ever exhibition at the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum to solely feature 3D printed pieces: ‘Industrial Revolution 2.0: How the Material World will Newly Materialise’.

Founded in 1857, the V&A is regarded by many to be the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with collections that span 3000 years of history and focus on teaching the principles of good design. They now consider 3D printing significant enough to be worthy of an exhibition, and significant enough that they have acquired the Fractal.MGX table and the One_Shot.MGX stool for their permanent collection.

Fractal.MGX - Designed by WerterOberfell - Platform in collaboration with Matthias Bär

One_Shot.MGX - designed by Patrick Jouin

The exhibition will form part of London Design Week and showcase works by Stephen Jones, Patrick Jouin, Iris van Herpen, and many others.  The pieces will be displayed in prominent positions throughout the museum, encouraging visitors to discover the futuristic creations in the context of their historical counterparts. If you’re curious about what to expect, simply browse the Moss website for a sneak peek.

‘Cellular’ chair - designed by Mathias Bengtsson

‘Escapism’ tunic - designed by Iris van Herpen and Daniel Widrig Credit: PETROVSKY & RAMONE

‘Palindrome II’ - designed by Peter Marigold

''Melonia'' shoes - designed by Naim Josefi

This is what curator Murray Moss has to say about it:

“We are witnessing an ‘Industrial Revolution 2.0’.

Radical advances in digital and laser technologies, initiated by industry leader Materialise, Belgium, and applied to what is currently referred to as Additive Manufacturing, allow for the three-dimensional ‘printing’ of objects, a sophisticated fabrication process once reserved for prototyping but which is quickly becoming ubiquitous and is profoundly permeating all areas of our contemporary material world, including fashion and domestic furnishings, as well as transportation, medicine, and architecture.

To emphasize the ‘viral’ nature of this Revolution, I have commissioned eight designs from the worlds of fashion and furnishings – all sponsored and produced by Materialise – which were chosen because they respond directly to corresponding masterworks in the Museum’s collection, and/or to prominent locations within the V&A, which I have visited regularly over the past 50 years. My aim was to initiate little ‘narratives’ – some of which I hope will amuse – between certain of the Museum’s historical holdings and these ‘futuristic’ contemporary objects, not only shedding new light on the Museum’s collection, but, in the process, demonstrating the wide reach of these new technologies.”

Murray Moss is an American design entrepreneur, founder of the design art company Moss, and considered by many as one of the design world’s leading arbiters of taste. Wallpaper* Magazine named Murray Moss among the 150 Most Influential Taste Makers of the past 15 Years, while the International Herald Tribune called his store in SoHo (NYC) “the best design store in the world“.

London Design Festival 2011
‘Industrial Revolution 2.0’
Sept. 17-25; Victoria & Albert Museum

Opening times: 10.00 to 17.45 daily 10.00 to 22.00 Fridays.
Entrance is free.

For further information, visit http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/l/london-design-festival-2011-displays-and-installations.

Tate Museum's Kirstie Beaven wonders whether museums are using social media creatively enough. She listed some recent activity by Tate: a Twitter discussion around the hashtag #artfilmtitle, a video dialogue with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and a Flickr collaboration. However, complained Beaven, "all of these things are basically one-offs [and] perhaps that's the nature of social media - essentially ephemeral." She continued that "most of our initiatives [...] have really been about finding creativity in our audiences, rather than pushing the creative boundaries of the social networking site as a medium."

Personally I think Tate is much more innovative than most organizations with social media, but it does raise a broader question for all organizations: is social media being used in a truly creative way? Or is it mostly about self-promotion and - that magic word - "engagement"? Let us know your thoughts, including any good examples of social media creativity.

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Here at ReadWriteWeb, we have an active presence on all of the main social networks; including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Our Community Manager, Robyn Tippens, does a fantastic job keeping our community thinking and talking about web technology. Plus of course, many of the RWW team are active on various social media channels - including Google Plus (which doesn't yet have brand pages).

Still, I often wonder whether there's more that we as an organization can do to foster creativity amongst our community. Although I can give one example, which I'm quite proud of, from RWW. Robyn does a regular 'Big Question' post, where she asks our community something about a hot tech topic and then uses Storify to collate the responses from RWW comments, Twitter and Facebook. An example is this recent Big Question: Would You Buy an Inferior Tablet, Over an iPad, If It Was Priced at Less Than $200?

Is your organization using social media creatively? If so, we'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Image credit: Twitter Art Project 2011 (via Simon Lewis)

Discuss

Illac Diaz, of non-profit My Shelter Foundation, brought the simple, cheap and innovative technology to the Philippines.
The slums in Manila are being transformed by a new twist on recycling.  Plastic bottles are now being viewed as a cheap and sustainable way to light homes instead of trash. 
 
Shanty town homes in Manila are often built so [...]

Google holds a doodling contest for kids every year.
Google has a yearly doodling contest for kids ages k-12.  Why shouldn’t  teachers encourage kids to doodle while in class?  Well, there seems to be a method for this madness and educational researchers from three Australian universities have shared their studies in the August 26, 2011 journal Science.
 
Psychology professor Shaaron Ainsworth from [...]

Say that the mind were non-physical, metaphysical, or whatever. Still, we know that physical brains give rise to minds, so mass-producing physical brains would still allow us to mass-produce non-physical minds. So, pure reductionism is not even necessary to carry the point I was making in the previous post.

In this day and age, it’s getting increasingly difficult to separate one’s virtual life from the real one. People go online to meet men (or women), message one another on Facebook, set up virtual dates, and decide to meet in real life if things go well. Companies are gauging a population’s moods via their Twitter accounts and using it as a marketing ploy (free Jell-o, anyone?)

One of the most popular social networks around is Facebook with around 750 million active users. A lot of apps have been released to try to make it easier for people to broadcast their lives online; but what about the reverse? What if you happened to just pass by a store you really liked, or saw something that you just want to tell the world about?

Cue the real-life Facebook “Like” button by Mario Klingemann. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to put up one of these buttons on every single thing in the physical world, but the idea in itself is just, well, extremely “like”-able, if you get what I mean. The Arduino-based “Like” button is actually part of the ”Ultra Social” UAMO-Festival 2011 that will be held in Munich.

I like Klingemann’s idea. What do you think?

[via Make: via Geeky Gadgets]

The first petaflop supercomputer, IBM's Roadrunner.

The quest to develop next-generation systems in high-performance computing has inspired technologies such as InfiniBand and parallel processing that have made their ways into data centers, but as the drive for exascale computing continues, it seems ingenuity is coming to an end. The government sees power consumption as the biggest problem and cost associated with exascale HPC (that’s a billion billion calculations per second) but Andrew Jones, writing at HPCwire, argues, that power isn’t the primary problem, programming is.

Power is a problem for exascale computing, and with current budget expectations is probably the biggest technical challenge for the hardware. Demonstrating the value of increased investment in supercomputing to funders and the public/media is probably an urgent challenge, too. But the top roadblock for achieving the hugely beneficial potential output from exascale computing is software. There are many challenges to do with the software ecosystem that will take years, lots of skilled workers, and sustained/predictable investment to solve.

I’ve seen this debate play out in the comments here at GigaOM on stories like this one, and find myself wondering if we have indeed relied on the “easy” fix of Moore’s Law to carry us forward in terms of performance. But now, as we’re reaching the end of that road in terms of manufacturing chips as well as power consumption, the hardware industry is trying to deliver new forms of silicon such as those based on memristors or some designed after the brain.

But before we talk about a wholesale shift in hardware platforms, Jones, from Numerical Algorithms Group, asks us to consider software. Parallel programming is still in its early days in terms of harnessing the massive compute available in a supercomputer, and Jones argues that figuring out solutions to just-identified problems associated with exascale computing will take large teams of experts and long-term investment.

I’d also argue that it needs to make the HPC industry attractive to the folks who are excited by solving these types of problems, but who might be currently creating startups or working for webscale companies wrestling with similar problems in different areas. Perhaps bringing some of these new, software-savvy minds into the HPC space might help spark the programming innovation that Jones thinks we need.

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Y Combinator, the popular startup incubator, unleashed its newest batch of fledgling technology companies into the world at its Summer 2011 Demo Day event last month. At six years old, Y Combinator is a veteran of sorts in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley innovation. But the quality of its latest startup class — and the interest it’s received from the tech industry’s most powerful investors — showed that YC is sharper than ever at choosing top-notch entrepreneurs and helping them shape solid startups.

And the search is already on for the next class of potential startup superstars. Y Combinator is currently accepting applications for the winter 2012 funding cycle, and the competition is stiff: Y Combinator generally accepts only three percent of the applications it receives, an acceptance rate lower than MIT or Harvard.

I recently sat down with Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston to find out what YC’s partners look for in entrepreneurs — you can watch our video below. Here are a few of her main points:

Co-founders should be buddies. Y Combinator prefers founding teams that consist of two or three people — and the friendlier they are with each other, the better. People who just met each other a month ago and decided to start a company usually raise YC’s red flags.
Hackers necessary. Being technical is important for the YC folks; Livingston is the only member of YC’s three-person founding team who does not know how to code. While they’ve loosened up their standards a bit by allowing in non-technical co-founders, YC insists that at least one member of a founding team have serious technical chops.
Flexibility is everything. If you’re a control freak, you probably won’t fit in at Y Combinator. YC looks for founders who are willing to take advice — and change everything about their startup if it’s not working out. Determination is important, but folks who seem stubborn during their YC interviews won’t make the cut.

Watch Jessica Livingston talk about what Y Combinator looks for in founders here:


Watch this video for free on GigaOM




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Chip for Quantum Computing The two black squares are the qubits, or processor; the center meandering line is the quantum bus; and the lateral meandering lines are the quantum memory. Erik Lucero
Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today - a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform. Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they're yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner.

In the first study, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they've built the first working quantum computer chip based on the von Neumann system. Named for the engineer who designed the concept, the von Neumann architecture combines processors and memory, and it's the basis for every computer out there. (With one notable recent exception.)

This quantum CPU (quCPU?) is a big breakthrough, because quantum computers by definition are difficult to design. They're based on the concept of superposition - that a quantum bit, or qubit, can exist in two different states at once. Put another way, it can be a 0 or a 1 at the same time, and it can therefore perform calculations more quickly than a system based on 0 or 1. But it's hard to keep the qubits in a state in which this is possible, and interfering with them - i.e., reading their data - can destroy their superposition capabilities. So, a system that integrates random access memory into the qubits is a big step toward a working computer.

Researchers at UCSB super-chilled their quCPU to near absolute zero and performed a few calculations. Quantum information traveled back and forth among storage and processing elements, and the system performed pretty well - not perfectly, but it's a start. They also found that the quantum memory can retain information for much longer periods than the qubits, which is also a good sign.

Next, the team is trying to increase the number of quantum devices integrated on a single chip, and they're studying different metallic materials to make this easier, according to Physics World.

In another quantum paper, researchers in Austria report building the first working quantum simulator - kind of like a quantum computer, but different in scope. It can be used to model the behavior of quantum systems, which can potentially help improve quantum computers.

It would be useful for many reasons to model the behavior of quantum systems, but this is impossible with a traditional computer, as Richard Feynman figured out in 1982. It would take exponential time, with the system working more and more slowly as the calculations increased in number. For a general description of a quantum spin system with 300 particles, a computer would need more memory than exists in the world - even if all of the observable matter in the universe was processed into memory, as the Austrian researchers put it last year. But a quantum simulator, which can complete so many more calculations, would not experience this slowdown. To make one of these, you would have to very carefully control the setup of the simulator, and this is what the Austrians have done.

The team used six laser-cooled calcium atoms as qubits, and used laser pulses to initiate calculations. They found the system could simulate several types of interacting spin systems, according to Science magazine, which published both papers today. The simulator can be reprogrammed to simulate any type of quantum system, the researchers say.

Given breakthroughs like these, quantum computers may be closer than ever.

[Science, Physics World]

By now, most people who work in the developed world have gotten used to the idea that the old nine-to-five routine is gradually becoming a thing of the past; plenty of people have shifts that start and end at different times, or they use job-sharing and other forms of flex-time. Some don’t even have traditional jobs at all any more, thanks to the evolution of the “gig economy” and the increase in freelancing. All of which raises a question that seems even more appropriate with Labor Day around the corner: Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?

Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:

Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.

Unstructured work is not for everyone
That kind of approach, which management consultants like to call a “results-oriented workplace,” might be fine for a creative endeavor like programming or design, or even for businesses (like GigaOM’s) that involve brain-powered work such as writing. But does it make any sense for other companies and industries? When Holman’s article got passed around in our office, my colleague Stacey said that this view of unstructured work only works for certain people — people without children, for example (who often have fairly rigid schedules governed by school, etc.) or other obligations that require them to work on something closer to a nine-to-five schedule.

Others argued that a less-structured schedule actually makes these things easier to handle rather than harder, since workers can leave whenever is necessary rather than waiting for the whistle to blow at 5.

Although there is plenty of research that shows both workers and companies benefit when hours are more flexible, not everyone — regardless of what business they work in — is going to want to work a totally unstructured schedule. And for some people, a specific routine isn’t just something that they need for external reasons: A job without defined parameters might actually increase the stress they feel, and therefore make them less productive or efficient. (A friend I know used to put on a suit and then walk down the hall to his office at home, just to simulate working in a regular workplace, because he needed the discipline.)

There’s another risk Holman’s description of the new unstructured workplace brings up, something we’ve written about a lot at GigaOM, and that is the impact that this can have on the “work-life balance” of employees. Says Holman:

By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.

If you can work any time, you can work all the time

But if it doesn’t feel like work and you can do it any time, how do you ensure you’re not working all the time? This is an issue that has been exacerbated by our increasingly always-on, always-connected, mobile-device-carrying culture. Knowledge workers of all kinds find themselves answering emails or responding to text messages at all hours of the day and night, working on weekends, and so on. And the increasing globalization of many industries has just accelerated this phenomenon, since some staffers or contract workers may be in completely different time zones.

In some ways, this requires more discipline on the part of the worker themselves: to set boundaries and say that he or she won’t be available at certain times, or to turn off devices during meals and on weekends. It’s something I and others at GigaOM have written about in the past, and something that remains an ongoing struggle. If your work is also something you enjoy doing, then your work can expand to fill virtually every available moment if you let it. But in the long run, that’s not good for employees or companies.

One thing is clear, however: This phenomenon isn’t going away; if anything, it is increasing, as more work becomes knowledge work, and as more companies try to adapt to a cloud-based and global world (flexible hours and an increase in freelance or contract work also has real benefits for companies in terms of lower costs, some of which are pushed down to the individual worker, such as the cost of health benefits).

When work is anywhere, companies need to change too
Companies like VMWare are trying to help figure out how the nature of work changes when it occurs in “the cloud” and the workforce moves toward what CEO Paul Maritz calls the “post-document era.” Instead of sitting at desks moving paper around, more people are working in ways that are difficult to define, that involve streams of information that don’t start or stop at specific times. And companies like Rypple are trying to re-engineer the human-resources requirements in that kind of workplace, so that measuring performance isn’t done once a year or every six months, but in something close to real time, using social tools that make more sense for such an environment.

Some companies have taken the unstructured work idea to its logical conclusion when it comes to traditional institutions such as vacation: Netflix has what it calls an “unlimited vacation” policy, which allows workers to take time whenever they need it, provided they arrange to have their work completed when necessary. Social Media Group, a Toronto-based consulting firm, is another that has taken this approach — one that CEO Maggie Fox described in a recent blog post.

The death of the nine-to-five workplace may not suit everyone, and a completely unstructured work schedule may not become the norm for all industries any time soon, but there’s no question that it is increasingly common. And adapting to it is going to require different skills — not just from employees, but from the companies that employ them.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Seattle Municipal Archives and John Lambert Pearson

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