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Doctorow interviewed on his book 'Little Brother': "I'm a presentist," he says, smiling broadly as he leans back in his chair. "All science fiction writers, whether they admit it or not, are writing metaphorically about the present. To extrapolate the future is really to comment on the now." Marvelous.
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"Speculation about the future of the national mapping agency – holder of one of the government's most valuable collections of digital data – arose in the run-up to Monday's pre-Budget report. The Sunday Times suggested Ordnance Survey was one of several state-owned businesses that would be privatised to help the chancellor balance the nation's red ink-filled books. But it was wrong."
links for 2008-11-27
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Nova highlights Bleeker's participation in the IFTF 'Blended Realities' programme, incl. pics.
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"KashKlash is a space to share thoughts on, and to shape, the future; a playground for visionary people like you, who, in a sense, are already living a few years ahead. Let’s start from the basic consideration that people have always shared and exchanged things. Sure, it comes to us naturally. But today’s digital communication systems are changing and expanding this age-old behaviour: not only are there new things to share – pictures, music, ratings, writings, videos, data and information – but there are now also many more platforms and opportunities for sharing and exchanging to take place."
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Nova reports: "The first issue of Design Research Quarterly features the above map that represents the “topography of design research” (made by Liz Sanders). She basically mapped the different approaches to design research based on two dimensions: 1. Their impetus: tools and methods coming from design practice versus those coming from the research perspective. To date, as she points out, most of the methods seem to be coming from the research field. 2. The mindset of those who practice and teach design research: the expert versus the participatory mindset. Which actually corresponds to the level of engagement designers have with people (informants, users, etc.)"
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Ito reports on the findings of the Digital Youth Project: "It's been over three years in the making, but we are at long last releasing the results of our Digital Youth Project. The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Media and Learning initiative"
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Doctorow: "Here's Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay talking about the importance of "procedural content generation" for massive online games — basically, using software to create worlds that had previously been hand-built by artists. It makes a lot of sense, but what fascinates me is the narrative possibilities for fiction about games: these procedural systems have or will shortly attain a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict their outcomes. It's the Halting Problem — worlds where software off the rails could generate impossible situations, upside-down worlds, treasure heaps, cowardly monsters and brave grass"
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"New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Exploring the European Union Research Policy in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, details key disappearing computer projects launched under the EU Fifth Framework Programme, during the period 1998-2003, including 2WEAR, ACCORD, FEEL, Interliving, GROCER, Ambient Agoras and E-Gadgets, among others."
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Nova highlights how the 'uncanny' is a perhaps overlooked and important aspect of design. Uncanny here means "the familiar can act strangely", in this example it is related to robotics but it could of course relate to anything with a degree of automation. I think Serendipity is probably important too… you cannot design 'for' the uncanny, simply pay attention when it happens.
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If you use OS maps to gather data for public use: "According to Ordnance Survey, the government's mapping agency, you've just broken its copyright, because the map you checked is licensed from it. And your […] licence, like most OS licences, doesn't allow you to put data derived from an OS map on to the world-visible Google Maps – even though Google's maps are also licensed from OS."
links for 2008-11-22
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Marvelous cartoon biography of Alan Kay's vision of the dynabook, the first notion of a 'portable' personal computer. Alan Kay was the Xerox PARC chap that said 'Look, the best way to predict the future is to invent it'.
links for 2008-11-19
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"The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, stated simply, holds that the act of observing an electron perturbs it so that its position and momentum cannot be measured simultaneously. A modest logical extrapolation might engender a Media Uncertainty Principle: when the mass media cover science, any given result is inevitably highlighted simply by reporting it, in a way that affects, positively and negatively, the public perception of science and the evolution of science itself."
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Nova highlights a location-based game modeled on the idea of 'turf wars'.
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"there are still a disquieting number of contemporary voices suggesting that all is not well with science journalism. "Science in the daily media is too often reported in the same deferential way as political journalists used to report politics in the 1950s," says Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times. "Many of the tensions, rows and skulduggery in the science community get far less attention than they would in business or politics.""
links for 2008-11-18
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Proof positive that Britain played a big part in the development of the modern computer.
links for 2008-11-17
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"What's the attraction of maps? I think it's a paradox. They are humanity's attempt to capture the world on paper. But as a cartographer you can capture only a micro-fraction of what exists. For a start, three dimensions must be elided into two, and the globe must be shown as a flat Earth. So you fudge. You are selective. You alter shapes and make crooked lines straight. You exaggerate features you consider important, and erase others."
links for 2008-11-14
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Stross highlights recent legislation allowing solely "virtual" companies in one US state, something he anticipated in a novel.
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"Mobile Multiplayer Trans-Reality Games is a new video game type like MMORPG , RTS ou FPS. MMTRG enable you to play in the real and in the virtual life with your mobile phone : Your city become your playground" – ARG on a wide-scale with LBS etc. Again, another Stross-like game a la 'Halting State'.
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Location Based Massively Multiplayer Games – echoing Stross' secret agents game in his recent book 'Halting State'. Augmented Reality Gaming with LBS?
links for 2008-10-27
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Nadine Faye James – superb illustrator, particularly with a typewriter! Nadine does amazing type-based portraits.
links for 2008-10-16
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Nik Baerten from Pantopicon interviews Nathan Shedroff on the tools design can bring to the application of foresight in various ways. As Shedroff says: "Design thinking and processes can be important contributors to the scenario-creating process but just as helpful for this implementation phase. In fact, alternate scenarios that build environments and artifacts can really help executives “see” how these scenarios might affect their business. Design processes bring a culture of brainstorming, critique, prototyping, and testing to the product and service development process."
links for 2008-09-04
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Cory Doctorow writes in Nature about peta-scale (bytes/flops/watts) data centres: "The mad, inconceivable growth of computer performance and data storage is changing science, knowledge, surveillance, freedom, literacy, the arts – everything that can be represented as data, or built on those representations. And in doing so it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data involved."