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A recently published patent by Microsoft reveals a unique way to provide tactility and texture to the normally flat, glassy feel of a touchscreen. If it came to fruition, your next tablet computer could morph and shape its screen to provide impromptu buttons, keyboards or textures....
Excerpt:
By NICK WINGFIELD, November 30, 2010
"Not since the invention of bacon and eggs has the collision of fowl and swine tasted so good.
A game called Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple's iPhone with a simple, whimsical premise: Players turn different species of scowling birds into projectiles with which to crush a collection of grunting pigs scattered around various ramshackle structures. More than 12 million copies of Angry Birds have been sold since it went on sale late last year, most of them 99-cent downloads for iPhones and iPod touches, according to Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company that created the game.
Why do smart people love seemingly mindless games? Angry Birds is one of the latest to join the pantheon of "casual games" that have appealed to a mass audience with a blend of addictive game play, memorable design and deft marketing. The games are designed to be played in short bursts, sometimes called "entertainment snacking" by industry executives, and there is no stigma attached to adults pulling out their mobile phones and playing in most places. Games like Angry Birds incorporate cute, warm graphics, amusing sound effects and a reward system to make players feel good. A scientific study from 2008 found that casual games provide a "cognitive distraction" that could significantly improve players' moods and stress levels..."
What if online video could prevent genocide? That’s what three USC Annenberg School graduate students wondered when they hopped a flight to Rwanda a few years ago, Flip cameras in their carry-ons.
“The idea was, in a time where YouTube exists, it’s immoral for genocide to exist in human history,” Jon Vidar told me recently. The group wanted to give survivors tools to tell their own stories. “Honestly, we were pretty idealistic going in.” Since that first visit to Rwanda, Vidar, a freelance photojournalist, and his journalist friends have taken the concept to neighboring countries and then, earlier this year, to Iraq. Their ad hoc trips have morphed into a nonprofit, kept going by volunteers, called The Tiziano Project, named for an Italian journalist who liked to go where he shouldn’t. Their mission is straightforward: Train locals in conflict zones and post-conflict zones in the craft of journalism, particularly new media, and give them the tools they need to tell their own stories.
“We’re trying to train locals to be journalists,” Vidar said.
The group’s most recent project, Tiziano360, trained 12 locals in Iraq in new media, producing a website that “documents the life, culture, and news in present day Iraqi Kurdistan.” Vidar worked in the Kurdish region of Turkey for four years doing archaeological research, a motive for the region selection. Logistically, it was easier to work on the Iraq side of the border, Vidar said.
The site has a slick design and the content is high quality. It recently won an award from the New Media Institute for multimedia storytelling. But Tiziano also has a practical aim. “A direct goal of the project is job creation,” Vidar said. “We don’t care where people get jobs, as long as they are using the skills in new media storytelling.”
Four of the participants credit the project with new job offers. Other trainees from past projects now string for Western outlets.
“The best thing in this project was the practical aspect of it,” Shivan Soto, who participated in the Iraq project, wrote in an email. “[It] was a very good and new experience for me.”
Since picking up new skills, Soto has been offered a variety of gigs from news organizations and NGOs. And another participant, Sahar Alani, took a job with a large corporation in the region working in new media.
For now, Tiziano is funded project-by-project. For the 360 experiment, they submitted a pitch to a Facebook contest backed by the JP Morgan Chase Community Giving program. They won $25,000, Andrew McGregor, a Tiziano founder, told me.
“During the competition, we really motivated the Kurdish community [on Facebook],” Vidar told me. “We had 600 Kurdish friends, friends in the government. We had friends in NGOs.”
Next up for Tiziano is a project that will start by working with students in Los Angeles and move on to the Congo. The trainer himself is a genocide survivor.
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What if online video could prevent genocide? That’s what three USC Annenberg School graduate students wondered when they hopped a flight to Rwanda a few years ago, Flip cameras in their carry-ons.
“The idea was, in a time where YouTube exists, it’s immoral for genocide to exist in human history,” Jon Vidar told me recently. The group wanted to give survivors tools to tell their own stories. “Honestly, we were pretty idealistic going in.” Since that first visit to Rwanda, Vidar, a freelance photojournalist, and his journalist friends have taken the concept to neighboring countries and then, earlier this year, to Iraq. Their ad hoc trips have morphed into a nonprofit, kept going by volunteers, called The Tiziano Project, named for an Italian journalist who liked to go where he shouldn’t. Their mission is straightforward: Train locals in conflict zones and post-conflict zones in the craft of journalism, particularly new media, and give them the tools they need to tell their own stories.
“We’re trying to train locals to be journalists,” Vidar said.
The group’s most recent project, Tiziano360, trained 12 locals in Iraq in new media, producing a website that “documents the life, culture, and news in present day Iraqi Kurdistan.” Vidar worked in the Kurdish region of Turkey for four years doing archaeological research, a motive for the region selection. Logistically, it was easier to work on the Iraq side of the border, Vidar said.
The site has a slick design and the content is high quality. It recently won an award from the New Media Institute for multimedia storytelling. But Tiziano also has a practical aim. “A direct goal of the project is job creation,” Vidar said. “We don’t care where people get jobs, as long as they are using the skills in new media storytelling.”
Four of the participants credit the project with new job offers. Other trainees from past projects now string for Western outlets.
“The best thing in this project was the practical aspect of it,” Shivan Soto, who participated in the Iraq project, wrote in an email. “[It] was a very good and new experience for me.”
Since picking up new skills, Soto has been offered a variety of gigs from news organizations and NGOs. And another participant, Sahar Alani, took a job with a large corporation in the region working in new media.
For now, Tiziano is funded project-by-project. For the 360 experiment, they submitted a pitch to a Facebook contest backed by the JP Morgan Chase Community Giving program. They won $25,000, Andrew McGregor, a Tiziano founder, told me.
“During the competition, we really motivated the Kurdish community [on Facebook],” Vidar told me. “We had 600 Kurdish friends, friends in the government. We had friends in NGOs.”
Next up for Tiziano is a project that will start by working with students in Los Angeles and move on to the Congo. The trainer himself is a genocide survivor.
ShareThis
Excerpt:
"...The traditional marketing strategy for these films has been to expand to more and more markets as word of mouth, press and publicity propel the films forward. In the age of social media, however, studios can use the Internet to figure out where an interest in the film exists.
One of the best examples of this strategy was for Paramount’s Paranormal Activity. The film, which was made for less than $15,000 went on to gross more than $150 million at the box office.
Paramount extensively used Facebook to promote the film, partnering with Eventful to get would-be fans to request a screening of the film in their area. The goal was to get 1 million fan requests for the film to enter wide release. That goal was met pretty quickly, but the real proof came via the box office receipts.
MGM also used Eventful to have fans request screenings of its comedy, Hot Tub Time Machine.
The cool thing about this strategy is that it lets fans have a sense of ownership of the film. It also creates a level of awareness and connection that you might not get just with running radio or TV spots.
This blog post is authored by Mic Wright, a regular Wired.co.uk and Wired magazine contributor. Here's an excerpt from the original post hoping that Cake Riots will take place everywhere!
"This Sunday (5 December, 2010), across the country and, in fact, the world, events are taking place with one purpose -- a protest against misery. From Dublin, where the cuts are going to lead to real riots in time, to London, where the students' voices have not been drowned out by the anarchist mob, people will get together to swap cakes with strangers.
That is the simple message of Cake Riot -- buns not bombs, cakes not kettling. In Kendal, home of the Mint Cake, people will come together in celebration of pure human kindness. In Kabul and New York, LA and Lowestoft, Swansea and Santa Barbara people will exchange cakes just for the hell of it....
....Cake Riot is a pure expression of what is good about the social web -- people coming together online with a shared purpose to have fun and make friends. Visit the Cake Riot website to find out more and join the Facebook Group. The London Cake Riot is this Sunday at 14.00 in Trafalgar Square with other events happening across the world at local times. Cake Riot FTW!"
Read the full post:
Making the series
The Virtual Revolution was an open and collaborative production, which encouraged the web audience to help shape the series. For each programme, you can explore the debates around programme themes, watch and comment on interview and graphics clips, and download clips for personal use and re-editing.
Programme 1: The great levelling?
The wonder and walls of Wikipedia; the blogger media revolution; who really has power on the web? Is it the online crowd or the 'gatekeepers'?
From psfk.com
"New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter was witness to a unique exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art last month. Organized by artists Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof, the exhibition made use of an augmented reality app called Layar to upload work that could only be seen via an iPhone.
While unsuspecting audience were appreciating the art galleries, Porter could see the Berlin Wall, a desert path and faces, all floating in air in front of him (video below)."
read more on psfk.com
From original post:
egradman | November 23, 2010 |
I had so much fun demonstrating StandardGravity on Saturday, that I decided to build this piece on Sunday.
Remember that scene at the end of the matrix where glowing green symbols traced across an agent's body? Well, this is just like that, but in realtime. What you're looking at here is a particle system, where YOU are the source of the particles. Particles (seen on screen as dots) spring into being on the surface of your body. They then traverse the contours of your body until they reach an edge, at which point they're flung into space and disappear. All this is possible because the Kinect lets me reconstruct the 3d geometry of whatever it sees.
There are other forces at work on the particles in this universe. Upon being flung into space, particles are acted upon by a sort of shifting wind (actually a perlin noise field)
The coolest part of this demo though is that you can really see how the particle system is sensitive to the geometry of the objects within view. In my hand here, I'm holding a bowl . When I turn the inside of the bowl to either face towards or face away from the camera, you can see the tendency of the particles to stream down surfaces. That behavior is noticably different when you're looking at the convex or the concave side of the bowl.
Once again, I've written this system using the freencet python bindings. The graphics are done with Panda3D. The particle system is a python module written in C. I'm losing some framerate because I'm passing depth data via shared memory, but the new version of the libraries don't require these sorts of software gymnastics.
Is Haruki Murakami Hollywood's new Philip K. Dick?
We've been wondering for a long time which author could replace Philip K. Dick as Hollywood's idea spigot. But now a strong candidate has emerged: Haruki Murakami, the Japanese master of weirdness who's already spawned two movies.
If you're looking for a Dickian storyteller who's got the pedigree to spawn some thought-provokingly weird movies, you don't have to look much further than Murakami, whose novels often include mysterious conspiracies, fantastical plot devices and alternate universes. Just like in many Dick's best books, Murakami's stories never entirely make sense, but they haunt you all the more for that. In particular, books like Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase feel particularly Dickian in a literary way.
Two different movies based on Murakami's work are coming soon, although neither of them is overtly fantastical. Norwegian Wood, based on Murakami's novel about a love triangle in the 1960s, is a movie from director Tran Anh Hung, coming out in Japan soon — but there's no release date in the U.S. yet. Meanwhile, there's also a short film, The Second Bakery Attack, starring Kirsten Dunst and Brian Geraghty, based on this short story. In the case of "Bakery," it seems like there's a weird sort of curse that causes an insatiable hunger that leads to extreme, bakery-robbing behavior that changes people's lives. But as with many of Murakami's fantastical devices, the hunger curse is kept extremely vague. Here's a clip from the short film:
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Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRELeonard Retel Helmrich’s “Stand van de Sterren” (Position Among the Stars) won both the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary and the Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Friday, which includes a €12,500 prize. This is the first time ever that a director has won the award for feature-length documentary twice at IDFA - Retel Helmrich also won in 2004 with “The Shape of the Moon.”
The film, which opened IDFA last week, is the final part of a trilogy that views modern Indonesia through the eyes of a grandmother, Rumidjah. Through her vantage point in the slums of Jakarta, the changing economy and globalization are reflected in the life of her juvenile graddaughter, Tari, and her sons, Bakti and Dwi.
Taking home a special prize was Luc Coté and Patricio Henriquez for “You Don’t Like the Truth – 4 Days inside Guantánamo” (Canada). The film revolves around the case of Omar Khadr, who was incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay at the age of sixteen and is based on recordings of his interrogation. Boris Gerrets, meanwhile, received the NTR IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary (€10,000) for “People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am” (the Netherlands), in which the director attempts to break through the anonymity of the big city by filming conversations with strangers on the streets of London with his mobile phone.
A scene from Leonard Retel Helmrich’s “Stand van de Sterren” (Position Among the Stars). Image courtesy of IDFA.
”Kano: An American and His Harem” (the Philippines) by Monster Jiminez received the €5,000 IDFA Award for First Appearance award. The film centers on an American who assembled a harem for himself in the Philippines and is now in prison for rape, though his many wives stick by him.
In other prizes, the Publieke Omroep IDFA Audience Award went to Lucy Walker’s “Waste Land” (€5,000) (UK/Brazil), about art photographer Vik Muniz, who is making a series of photographs of refuse scavengers at the world’s biggest refuse dump, in Rio de Janeiro.
Eva Küpper received the IDFA Award for Student Documentary for “What’s in a Name” (Belgium). The film is about New York body art performer Jon Cory and his sexual ambivalence: explicit performances he calls “gender terrorism.”
The Hyves IDFA DOC U Award, the €1,500 award granted by a separate youth jury, went to “Autumn Gold” by Jan Tenhaven (Germany/Austria). The film follows five extremely aged athletes preparing for a competition in Finland.
The first ever IDFA Award for Best Green Screen Documentary (€2,500) went to “Into Eternity” (Denmark/Sweden/Finland) by Michael Madsen. The film is an existential message for future generations about Onkalo, a depot deep below the rocky ground, where Finnish nuclear waste is to be permanently stored.
The jury also gave an honorable mention to “The Pipe” (Ireland) by Risteard Ó Domhnaill about resistance by local activists on the Irish west coast to the construction of a gas pipe line by multinational Shell.
Finally, for the first time, IDFA’s DocLab also inaugurated an award - the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling went to “HIGHRISE/Out My Window” (Canada) by Katerina Cizek. The project utilizes 360-degree image technology to portrays apartments and their inhabitants in cities around the world.
IDFA continues through Sunday, though it estimates its attendance increased by about 15,000 to 180,000 from 165,000 compared to 2009. IDFA released its estimated earnings this year, saying their intake went from €750,000 in 2009 to €850,000 this year. The number of Dutch and international guests increased in relation to 2009: to 2,477 from 2,295.
Excerpt from the article on artreview.com :
"Creating imagery to counter the steady stream of negative coverage is one of the ambitions of Haas & Hahn's Favela Painting project, which they launched in 2006 with some funding from the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Rio Cruzeiro follows the project's first act, The boy with the kite, a mural in the centre of Vila Cruzeiro on the side of a building that became the neighorhood's first art gallery. The inspiration for the project came in 2005 when Haas & Hahn (their name is derived from the last syllables of Koolhaas & Urhahn) first came to Rio to make Firmeza Total, a short documentary commissioned by MTV on the role of hip hop in the lives of favela youth. Struck by the disconnect between these neighorhoods and the city that surrounds them, Haas & Hahn started imagining ways to encourage the citizens of Rio to take a second look at one of their city's defining features.
"If you want to build a bridge between these two sides of the city that live side by side but have an enormous gap between them," Urhan tells me later, "the easiest way is to do it through some sort of art intervention." Koolhaas adds: "We tried to find a way for the [residents'] sense of pride to be painted on the walls of the favela so that the outside world could see how good they feel about themselves and could understand that there are families here that can take care of themselves."
From the site:
"Our Latest Work On Praça Cantão In Santa Marta
On the 29th of march we finished work on the latest Favela Painting and our first part of 'O Morro': Praça Cantão. The central square at the foot of the community of Santa Marta, a favela in the heart of Rio de Janeiro.
You can find information and Images about this and our earlier work on this site."
Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able have to cross an infected zone peopled by aliens in Gareth Edwards's Monsters.
This time last year, the film world was raving about how Avatar was going to "change the game" (even that expression feels so 2009), but it could turn out we were looking in the wrong direction. For sure, Avatar has changed the movie landscape: without it, we'd never have had such 3D delights as The Last Airbender, Resident Evil: Afterlife and Garfield's Pet Force. But perhaps the industry should have been looking harder – and worrying more – about Monsters.
- Monsters
- Production year: 2010
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 94 mins
- Directors: Gareth Edwards
- Cast: Scoot McNairy, Whitney Able
Directed by 35-year-old Brit Gareth Edwards, this is another credible alien sci-fi movie. But instead of Avatar's blue cheese, it servers up hipster indie vibes and, despite the title, offers a genuine alternative to your standard monster-movie fare. What's really striking about Monsters, though, is that the entire film was put together using standard equipment and off-the-shelf computer software, for around half-a-million dollars – which is probably less than James Cameron's on-set beard technologist gets.
"The history of cinema has always been an industrial process where you needed hundreds of people to make a movie, and that's just not true any more," says Edwards. "Now you can just do it with a handful." At least, you can if you're a multi-tasking maverick like Edwards, who's officially Monsters' director, writer, cinematographer, production designer and visual effects supervisor. The latter is the key: he wasn't actually supervising anyone; he did all the effects himself in his bedroom.
But without 10 years' experience doing effects for TV, Edwards would never have been able to envisage doing a movie like Monsters. It was also seeing the inefficiency of the studio process that inspired him. "Sometimes you'd have 100 people on the set and you'd ask, 'Can we do this? Can we do that?' And they'd say, 'No, we can't, because we'd have to move all these people. It's too expensive and it would take too long.' That felt very back to front: to be told you can't do something because you're spending too much money. Shouldn't it be the other way round?"
But the story of how Edwards made Monsters is destined to be retold more than the story of the movie itself. It's set in the near future, six years after a crashed space probe resulted in an "infected zone" between Mexico and the US. Our heroes, a world-weary freelance photographer (Scoot McNairy) and his boss's daughter (Whitney Able), must cross this aggressively quarantined zone to get back to the US. The aliens that lurk there – sort of giant walking octopuses – are rarely shown, but their presence is continually implied by ruined ships and aircraft (strewn like toys across derelict landscapes), giant border walls, patrolled fences, and huge warning signs everywhere telling people to stay the hell away.
"I was about to try and do a 'Blair Witch meets War Of The Worlds', shooting it all on a video camera," Edwards explains, "and then the Cloverfield trailer came out, and I thought, 'Oh. Damn. Right, can't do that, then ..."
'We grabbed people in the street and asked if they wanted to be in the film. It was very guerrilla, really'
If Cloverfield is like 9/11, then Monsters is more present-day Afghanistan, he says. "It's years later, no one cares, it's the other side of the world and it's somebody else's problem." And instead of Cloverfield's disaster-movie dynamics, Monsters gives you more of a low-key indie road romance. Something like Before Sunrise meets District 9, or maybe Predators meets In Search Of A Midnight Kiss (which, coincidentally, also starred McNairy).
Most of the film was shot with a crew of just four: Edwards behind the camera, a sound man, a line producer and his Spanish-speaking equivalent. And they basically made it up as they went along, driving through Central America in a van with the actors. They'd ask around for any out-of-the-ordinary, post-apocalyptic-looking stuff nearby, then jump out, shoot a scene (improvised, of course) and move on, editing on a laptop in hotels at night. "We had a rough plan but most of the time when we turned up, it was the first time we'd ever been there. We grabbed people in the street and asked if they wanted to be in the film. It was very guerrilla, really." When they got back home, Edwards added in the monsters, the signs, the barricades, the crashed planes, the ruined buildings … In fact, the whole sci-fi element was added retrospectively in his bedroom.
It sounds like every aspiring film-maker's dream, a sort of gap-year backpacking holiday with a movie shoot thrown in. Edwards doesn't remember it like that, though. On top of hazardous local conditions, illnesses, back pains and other hardships, it was endless stress and pressure and exhaustion. "I sit and watch the film now," he says, "and I think, 'That looks like an adventure. I wish I'd gone on that trip. And then I realise, 'Oh yeah. I did. It was horrible.'"
That probably won't put people off following Edwards's example; after all, there's more processing power in a decent PC now than it took to make, say, Jurassic Park. Indeed, Edwards made Monsters using Adobe's After Effects software, a widely available cousin of Photoshop. Finding no plug-in for alien tentacles, he adapted a program that models rope. The CGI planes and cars you see were all bought off the internet, like real props.
To misquote Jean-Luc Godard, all you need to make a movie is a girl and laptop, right? Perhaps. But it might take more than a splurge in Dixons, warns Edwards. "When I first bought a computer in 1997, I thought, 'I'll learn this software and a few months later I'll make a movie.' It took me nearly a decade to get good enough at it," he says modestly.
'Anyone who says they know what's going to happen in film-making is lying, but it's definitely changing'
And he's right to be cautious. He's not the only one doing this: visual effects expertise is now a regular route to the director's chair. There's the Brothers Strause, owners of California effects house Hydraulx, who directed Alien Vs Predator: Requiem and current alien-invasion flick Skyline. There's Scott Charles Stewart, who contributed effects to the Harry Potter and Pirates Of The Caribbean franchises and also directed this year's Legion (the one with Paul Bettany as an angel) and the forthcoming Priest (the one with Paul Bettany as, er, a priest). And, most notably, there's South Africa's Neill Blomkamp, who also spent 10 years doing CGI before striking gold with District 9 (like Monsters, District 9 put special effects where we weren't used to seeing them).
Now, the danger is, with effects people wagging the dog, you'll tend to get a certain type of movie out of it. Effects-centric directors don't make costume dramas or romcoms. For every District 9, there are a dozen examples of the type of mindless, bludgeoning sci-fi epic we've all grown heartily sick of, like Skyline, which boasts A-grade special effects but a depressingly mindless script. Monsters, too, has its weaknesses – its "aliens and indigenous folks = good; US military = bad" motif is really not so far removed from Avatar's – but it at least does something fresh, story-wise as well as budget-wise.
For his next mission, Edwards has teamed up with Russian effects ace Timur Bekmambetov, of Night Watch and Wanted fame, to make something more ambitious and bigger budget, but incorporating his guerrilla approach. In the meantime, if Monsters does well, the cash-strapped studios will doubtless wonder if they're not better off getting 500 films like it for the same price as one Avatar.
"Anyone who says they know what's going to happen in film-making is lying, but it's definitely changing," says Edwards. "It reminds me of that era when people like Spielberg and Scorsese turned up, when the studios didn't understand this new young audience and all those people got a chance to play and make artistic films.
"No one's too sure what the future's going to be," he continues. "So if you can grab a camera and tell a story, there's a good chance you can do something. In the chaos, there's always opportunity."
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Professor Steven Hechter's article is published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and can be found here:
Arcade Fire: 'the first rock group in a long time that have dared to be so unashamedly uplifting, to shun irony'. Photograph: Eric Kayne/http://erickayne.com
In a concrete room backstage at the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona, I am midway though a post-show interview with Arcade Fire's unfeasibly tall, quietly charismatic lead singer, Win Butler, when the door opens and his bandmate, Richard Reed Parry, enters. He roots around in a cupboard for a few moments, then exits again, having found what he was looking for – a yoga mat.
It strikes me later that this may be a small, but revealing, indication of a bigger pop-cultural shift that Arcade Fire exemplify: an illustration of just how far rock music has travelled from its rebellious roots, how much it has shed the emotional baggage – the angst, the self-destructive habits, the dissolute lifestyle – that once defined it. Suffice to say that there was a time, not that long ago, when yoga would not have been the preferred means of post-gig relaxation for a hip young rock star, but, my, how times have changed.
"The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to me," says Butler, who, as we chat, is eating brown rice salad from a small plastic container and sipping on a throat-soothing brandy. "We're not a band that's out to party until we die every night. We did a lot of shows with a lot of bands that were living that dream, but it's a dream I never bought into. It never seemed that fun. In fact, it was always kind of embarrassing to me. That isn't what I think is cool about rock."
In case you have not noticed, Arcade Fire – a multi-instrumental, mixed gender, seven-piece indie-rock group from the very un-rock'n'roll city of Montreal, Canada – are what is most cool about rock right now. The group's debut album, Funeral, was released in 2004 on the small independent label Merge Records. Initially championed by influential American music websites such as Pitchfork, it became one of the most critically lauded albums of the year, selling more than half a million copies globally.
read the full article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/28/arcade-fire-interview-sean-ohagan#
Do any of us honestly believe that our powers of concentration are enhanced by multitasking? Of course not. The question is, what are we gaining by having all this near-instantaneous access to information, and does it in some sense outweigh what we give up in sustained concentration?
Not only that, but the internet gives us the ability to interact—at virtually no cost, and across vast distances—with other individuals; and of course it gives us the ability to participate, ourselves, in discourse. This social, interactive dimension of the internet can't be dismissed as just another source of distraction. It's the ability to collaborate in real time, to compare, to debate. That kind of connection and combination--that's a rich primordial soup out of which emergent phenomena are apt to arise.
Many have argued that what we've arguably surrendered in depth we've more than made up for in increased breadth—that we've had a net gain in total volume, in depth times breadth.
I'm more interested in another kind of breadth—the expansion of information horizons the internet has brought to a much, much greater portion of humanity. There's been, in short, a kind of democratization of intelligence.
When you hear people say that "the internet is making us stupid," you need to ask yourself who this "us" they're talking about actually is. If you think about it, in most cases it's implicitly being defined in a very elitist way: Is "us" just a privileged intelligentsia that enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted hours of reading with concentration? I say let us use a more inclusive "us."
One that includes the hundreds of millions in lower-tier cities and in rural areas of China, for instance, who've begun using the internet just in the last five years: tell them that the internet's making "us" stupid. So a generation of privileged Americans and Brits find they can no longer power through chapter after chapter of Tolstoy or Proust. If a much larger generation of long impoverished people across the developing world are seeing their information horizons immeasurably broadened in the bargain, I call that an excellent deal.
Not only is the "us" too narrowly defined, but so is the intelligence that my opponents claim is being sucked out of us by the evil internet. Sure, I'd admire anyone with the pure power of concentration to allow him or her to digest at one sitting several hundreds of pages of Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason. But is that the only type of intelligence worthy of the name?
You see, we're being asked to lament the decline of what is in fact a too-narrowly defined idea of intelligence. Should we prize the ability to concentrate and to read deeply? Absolutely. Should we privilege that type of intelligence over other types? I can't see why we should.
excellent challenge to west-centric pov
Digital butler: This universal in-box pulls in e-mails, text messages, tweets, Facebook updates, and more. It’s an effort to make it easier for people to handle all the communication technologies offered by a smart phone.
Credit: Nokia Research CenterCommunications
Out of Many, One In-box
Nokia experiments with a universal in-box that combines messages from many separate apps into a single place.
- Wednesday, November 24, 2010
- By Tom Simonite
Excerpt:
"The universal in-box looks superficially like a regular e-mail in-box. But the stream of recent messages can be a mixture of e-mails, text messages, call logs, tweets, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and more.
Just last week, Facebook launched its Messages product—aka an "e-mail killer"—to combine e-mail with text messages and private Facebook messages. Smart phones can already receive messages sent over those and other communications channels, but the messages are stuck in separate app "silos." "The universal in-box brings together all those communications into one place so the user does not need to check separate apps," says Rafael Ballagas, a researcher at Nokia Research Center, in Palo Alto, California.
That makes it easier to track and carry out conversations that span different kinds of messaging. For example, it would be simple to see that someone responded to a Twitter update with a text message. It would also be possible to seamlessly switch methods of communication, and reply to a person's latest Facebook update by e-mailing them."
read full post on www.technologyreview.com
Excerpt:
"Has a viable new medium emerged yet? Who's getting it most right, or least wrong, at the moment?
JL: There are plenty of interesting experiments but no clear direction. Digitally, the iPad has shown potential but little true definition of what might come next. It hints at how curated content might be better presented than it has been on free-for-all websites. The iPad social network aggregator FlipBoard is an excellent example of how material could be presented using algorithmic design to take raw words and lift them beyond a mere list. Some of the blog apps are interesting: Mashable, Coolhunting. Pulse News is another interesting app to watch. But there's also the business side. A key development will be how publishers manage to link print and apps.
JJ: Making our editorial content available on key platforms means we can be sure we are reaching as big an audience as possible. Just as there are several strong British and American news websites, there are several strong iPhone and iPad apps in the news category. It is no concidence that they have been developed on the whole by the blue-chip publishers on the US east coast and in London.
JLW: Who knows, but if we sit around waiting for the perfect medium, we'll never progress at all. Everyone who has made a start deserves a pat on the back, but it's probably the companies with the deepest pockets that are going to make the biggest advances and the biggest mistakes. It may get even more interesting when the smaller guys get involved.
Where do the iPad and similar tablets fit in with that? Are they the answer?
JL: They are only the latest step to what's next. They are excellent devices for enjoying video and browsing the web but have yet to definitively prove themselves as a workable home for magazine-type content.
JJ: The iPad is a fabulous piece of kit and still in its infancy; that is perhaps the most exciting aspect of it. Version one offers stunning opportunities for publishers and consumers alike, but what about versions two, three, four. . .? The iPad is just one way forward — and not the answer — for publishers as they adapt and progress in the fast-changing digital marketplace.
JLW: If tablets become as ubiquitous as the radio became in the Twenties and Thirties, so that even poor people have access to one somewhere, we may see a big change. There may be unintended consequences: Hitler, for example, wouldn't have been so effective without radio, nor would Bing Crosby."
read full post on the telegraph.co.uk
Excerpt:
"I've devoted my career to researching how young people take up new technologies like computers, mobile phones, and the Internet and make them their own. If we pay attention to what young people do when they are socializing and having fun with these new media, it's clear that they are both highly engaged and learning a great deal. For most young people, however, this is about learning how to get along with their friends, what it takes to get a date, or how to get to the next level in Halo, and not the kinds of academic learning and civic engagement that schools are concerned with. As a parent and educator who is also an anthropologist committed to appreciating youth perspectives, I stand at the cusp of two different learning cultures--one that is about youth-driven social engagement and sharing, and the other that is embodied in educational institutions' adult-driven agendas. My biggest challenge has been to find what it would take to get alignment between the energy that kids bring to video games, text messaging, and social network sites and the learning that parents and educators care about. I have been on a quest for examples of educational institutions and programs that can bridge this cultural divide, and I'd like to share an example that has come out of collaborations I have had with some of my colleagues in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.
Last month, I paid a visit to the YouMedia space in Chicago Public Library's Harold Washington Library Centre in downtown Chicago. The space was teeming with teens sitting on bright comfy sofas, chatting and eating, playing Rock Band, mixing music, heads down in front of laptops, and getting feedback from digital media mentors. Check out spoken word artist and mentor Mike Hawkins freestyling if you want to sample what YouMedia has on tap. Unlike any other library experience I had growing up, YouMedia is loud, sociable, and hip -- but it's still all about the public mission of the library to serve as a point of access to culture, information, and the media of the day, staffed by smart guides to knowledge and literacy. Nichole Pinkard and Amy Eshleman, who oversee the site, took me aside to explain that over a hundred teens come through the space every day to check out laptops, make media, read books, engage in workshops and special projects, or just hang out with friends in a safe environment. They say that since they opened their doors to this teen-only media space about a year ago, news spread by word of mouth, texting, and social media messaging peer-to-peer among teens across the city, and their population includes young people in diverse public and private schools, as well as home schoolers...."
Read full post on huffingtonpost.com
Excerpt:
"Sarah Palin never claimed she could see Russia from her house – that was Tina Fey – but she went one better on Glenn Beck's radio show in discussing the tensions in the Korean Peninsula and saying: "We've got to stand with our North Korean allies".
A transcript of the radio show reads:
Interviewer: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea?
Palin: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from a greater problem, when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do. So this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies – we're bound to by treaty....
Interviewer: South Korean.
Palin: Yes, and we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes...."
yikes.
From original post:
WMAP's view of the past: can it see beyond the Big Bang?
"Circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons". That is the sensational claim being made by University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite support his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology". This claim is bound to prove controversial, however, because it opposes the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology.
According to inflationary theory, the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.
Penrose, however, takes issue with the inflationary picture and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born – an extremely high degree of an order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe...."
Swedish Storytelling is the answer to the following question:
Original Post by Ed Cotton:
"2. What do you believe a controlled and inspired crowd of thinkers can bring to the table that an individual can't?
More heads are better than one, under the right conditions. But instead of listening to me pontificated, try this:
1. Pair up with someone
2. One of you is the storyteller and the other does nothing
3. The storyteller comes up with a made up title of a story that has never been told before
4. They tell the story
Now try this:
1. Pair up with someone
2. One of you is the storyteller, and the other is the word giver
3. Have the word giver give the storyteller a made up title of a story to tell
4. The storyteller begins telling the story. During the story, the word giver will call out random words that have nothing to do with what the storyteller is talking about. For instance, if the story is about a trip to the beach, the word giver avoids helpful worlds like "sand", "waves", "surfboards", etc..Instead you give completely disassociated words like "pudding", "dinosaur", and "Sean Connery"
5. The storyteller has to instantly incorporate the random words into the story. The word giver must wait until the word just given is incorporated into the story before calling out a new one
6. After a while, the storyteller finds an ending to his/her story and then the players switch roles.
This is called Swedish Story Telling (for no apparent or obvious reason that I can see).
Which story is more memorable? Which was easier to tell? A Swedish Story forces new connections. It slams agendas and expectations together and allows the unexpected to emerge. It's created by more than one person. It's co-created (yes, that word again) and it's a hell of a lot more fun to tell."
Read the full interview on influxinsights.com
