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“BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The ability of Google Inc’s map service to put detailed street-level images on the Internet could raise concerns in Europe if it was introduced there, the EU’s data protection agency said on Thursday.”
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“The double-edged sword that comes with keeping abreast of all the latest developments in technology means that we’re always aware of the latest and greatest applications and services to try…but it also means that we’ve tried all of them. Unlike the ave
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“Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability
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“Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated cont
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“One of the dangers of doing history of science or science studies (both of which I studied when I was in grad school, and taught before becoming a futurist) is that you end up spending time talking to your subjects. Generally, when you’re an anthropologi
Archive for May, 2008
links for 2008-05-17
Saturday, May 17th, 2008links for 2008-05-16
Friday, May 16th, 2008-
“muscle memory - a far more important element of software than many designers realise. If you don’t use keyboard shortcuts, then you’re wasting precious hours every week (if not day) fiddling with the mouse, moving around the screen when you could just pr
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Sony’s model for NFC.
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“QR Code is capable of handling all types of data, such as numeric and alphabetic characters, Kanji, Kana, Hiragana, symbols, binary, and control codes. Up to 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol.”
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“HP Labs researchers have developed a wireless data chip that could revolutionize the way you think about information stored on paper and other physical objects… The tiny Memory Spot chip – less than half the size of a grain of rice — makes it possi
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Press release: “HP today announced that its researchers have developed a miniature wireless data chip that could provide broad access to digital content in the physical world… With no equal in terms of its combination of size, memory capacity and data
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“Technology can be sublime, but machines aren’t something that happens to us; they’re something we make. That is, they’re less like meteors that come crashing into our planet (actually, “billiard balls” appears to be the preferred metaphor) than
links for 2008-05-15
Thursday, May 15th, 2008-
“The supermarket chain Budgens has installed face recognition cameras in one of its stores to stop children buying alcohol and cigarettes.”
“Charlie Willetts, managing director of Charton Ltd, which is supplying the software, said about 1,500 images were
links for 2008-05-14
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008-
“On this site I aim to investigate the Technium. What does it want? Why do we embrace it? Is it possible to reject it? How does it relate to God, if at all? What kind of control do we really have on the pace and future path of the Technium itself?”
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” Starting May 31, visitors to New York’s Battery Maritime Building will be able to take part in Byrne’s interactive music installation called simply “Playing the Building.” Like its self-explanatory title implies, the Battery will be fitted with devices
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“What is technology? What does technology mean? Where does technology reside? One
notion of technology, which originated in the Greek téchnē, points to the rational ability
to create and produce. Modern technology grew out of ancient téchnē by -
“A team of engineers at the University of California at Berkeley has developed a technique for transmitting medical images via cellphones.”
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“You’ve heard of user-generated content? Instead of people recording silly Web cam videos for YouTube or inventing frivolous advocacy groups on Facebook, they can help make the mobile Internet more useful.”
Equus and becoming-animal
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Etruscan black-figured depiction of a centaur on amphora - Flickr user: diffendale
I saw the excellent production of Equus currently playing at the Theatre Royal Bath on Saturday. The cast gave a brilliant performance, I was particularly impressed with the ever-energetic Simon Callow and his masterful depiction of the psychiatrist Martin Dysart. Alfie Allen was also very good as Alan Strang.
All of the allusions to Freud got me thinking though…
“Afterwards, he says, they always embrace.
The animal digs his sweaty brow into his cheek… and they stand in the dark for an hour… like a necking couple.
And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse… not the boy, the horse, and what he might be trying to do.
I keep seeing the huge head, kissing him with its chained mouth… nudging through the metal, some desire absolutely irrelevant… to filling its belly or propagating its own kind.
What desire could this be? Not to stay a horse any longer? Not to remain reined up forever in those particular genetic strings?
Is it possible, at moments we can’t imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together… the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life… and turn them… into grief?
What use is grief… to a horse?
You see… I’m lost.”
The opening lines of Equus - Peter Shaffer
‘The politics of becoming-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence’
Deleuze & Guattari (2006) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum - p. 273
links for 2008-05-13
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008-
“Almost unnoticed last week, the Government announced it had shaved another £1 billion off the cost of its proposed identity card scheme… It did so by deciding to let the “open market” capture citizens’ biometrics, effectively outsourcing the cost of e
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“Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device to determine its position with an accuracy of 20 meters. Unlike GPS receivers, which use satellites to determine their locat
links for 2008-05-10
Saturday, May 10th, 2008-
Drinking water everywhere? Self-healing spinal cords? An embedded super PDA that remembers all you hear or say? Lifespans stretching well past the century mark? Sounds like science fiction, but IBM scientists say that projects incubating in labs today mig
links for 2008-05-09
Friday, May 9th, 2008-
“Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City - An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture”
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“Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the publ
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“Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, “sterile” boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology… Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don’t lend themselves to the sort
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“our argument for a more “hope-
ful”research practice is both “ontological”(that urban technologies are, to
some degree, unstable and therefore precarious achievements) and “episte-
mological”(that our knowledge of the practices through
links for 2008-05-06
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008-
An economist journo does a reasonable job linking ’smart mobs’ to citizen science via Eric Paulos’ “Ergo” air quality sensing project and the broader urban atmospheres work.
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Jessica Kraft sez: “Who says you need a PhD in ecology or a research grant from NASA to make a scientific breakthrough? Citizen science is a growing movement of thousands of amateurs who collect, enter and classify data that would have taken researchers y
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Intel Berkeley’s “Participatory Urbanism” project, which is interlinked with the broader system of “Urban Atmospheres” projects, such as “Ergo”
links for 2008-05-02
Friday, May 2nd, 2008-
A Masters student’s project: “I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone’s phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last sem
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“A Ghostbike is a junker bike that has been painted stark white and afixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed by a car driver. Ghostbikes are intended to be memorials for the fallen and reminders to everyone to SHARE THE ROAD with one anot
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There was an interesting radio programme aired today about the influences of the political movements surrounding May ‘68 upon and from French philosophy (partic. Ecole Superieur). It features interview excerpts with Badiou, Foucault, Henri-Levi, Ranciere
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“Cultural studies has historically concerned itself with the cultural practices of the everyday and the now. However, as a politically motivated discipline, cultural studies has an ongoing preoccupation with cultural, economic, and political change, and t
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“Cati Vaucelle, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab will present two recent projects developed for the Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group focused on Gesture Object Interfaces.
“At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. In
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BBC News journalist swans around PARC looking at ‘cool’ stuff…
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“Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work. Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use
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“By anticipatory governance, we mean the ability of a variety of stakeholders and the lay-public to prepare for the issues that NSE may present before those issues are manifest or reified in particular technologies.”
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Richard Donahue’s personal site
