This thread is a mess, filled with too many analogies and lofty idealistic rhetoric that is appropriate to the dramatic circumstances but fail to help us think clearly through them. Forget this consciousness stuff, it isn’t helping. Let us start again. On the one hand, we have Uglycat arguing that we are experiencing a fundamental shift in social organization, a shift made possible by the democratizaton of incredibly powerful networked technologies. On the other hand, we have Petey’s much more moderate claim in the main Revolution thread: Petey posted: – social media played some unknown but presumably nontrivial role in both a) spreading the word about the self-immolations among sympathetic citizens and b) facilitating the organization of collective action protests I think everyone will agree with Petey about the nontrivial role of social media and internet organization. The operative question in this thread is what substantial role these new technologies have played, and does this represent a fundamental shift in the narrative, or is this just a continuation of old themes in slightly new packaging. I think the key to understanding this is being specific about what would count as a ‘fundamental’ shift. I’m going to point to Deep Hurting’s latest comic to give a sense of what fundamental means in this context. Ignore Deep Hurting’s political comment for a second, and just think about the appropriation of the famous painting of Lady Liberty in the throes of revolution, holding a smartphone in her outstretched hand. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the protestors today is their use of these social devices. It is a badge of self-identification, it distinguishes and marks off as unique the revolutions currrently underway from those in the past. The causes are the same (liberty), but the defenders of that cause are equipped differently. In […]

Watch these two TED Talks from robot researchers Heather Knight and Cynthia Breazeal, on interactive robot comedy and why we don’t have robots in our homes yet

Shared by Daniel haha what the hell The insane epicness of this movie cannot possibly be overstated. And somehow, the fact that it’s overdubbed in Russian makes it just that much more awesome. It’s called Robot, and if you get a copy, send it to me. Immediately. Update: the full movie is here on YouTube (all 2+ hours of it), with English captions! VIA [ Laughing Squid ]

In a piece for Slate titled “My Puny Human Brain,” former-Jeopardy-greatest Ken Jennings talks briefly through his experience playing against IBM’s Watson. If you were hoping for some sour grapes, you won’t find it here, but Ken gives a great insight into what it feels like to be an underdog human up against a PR darling supercomputer. “Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.” Ken wraps it up on an uplifting, humans-are-going-to-be-alright-after-all note, and we seem to have something in our eye… Ken Jennings talks about losing to Watson, being human after all originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | source Slate | Email this | Comments

Oh, sure — Masdar City’s driverless pods may not make nearly as many stops as your average metro, but it essentially matches the usefulness of the subway station in Pyongyang. And with a lot less energy waste, to boot. If you’ll recall, these driverless pods were planned years ago, and while the ambitions have been quelled somewhat thanks to the economic crunch, that hasn’t stopped students and engineers from using 2GetThere’s pods, magnets and a fiber optic system to create a two-stop transfer system at the university. For now, they’re whisking students between a pair of drop points that are 800 meters apart, traveling 15 miles per hour and instilling fear into everyone who dares step inside. As for the future? Only The Jetsons truly know, but you can take a glimpse in the video just past the break. Continue reading Masdar City’s driverless pods now whisking students around on a limited basis (video) Masdar City’s driverless pods now whisking students around on a limited basis (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Autoblog Green | | Email this | Comments

Shared by Daniel This is a pretty brilliant nudge. For the most part, Americans don’t like the simple, boring act of putting money in a savings account. We do, however, love to play the lottery. So what if you combined the two, creating a new kind of savings account with a lottery payout? …

h+ Magazine is a new publication that covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing human beings in fundamental ways.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a story by NPR’s Planet Money team about “Toxie” a toxic asset they had purchased to follow and help tell the story of the recent financial meltdown. One of the mortgages in Toxie was on a home bought for investment in Bradenton, Florida, and the team took a look at housing in the area. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were “enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years”. Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida.

Again in the D&D revolution thread: I’m not sure if you explicitly know this, but you are basically giving a rough definition of ‘media’ in the technical sense of the term. It is important that ‘new media’ is understood as a genuinely new medium of communication, and how rare and wonderful the creation of a new medium is. You are being too generous with your ‘phases’; the printed word is basically identical to the broadcasted word in the technical sense of ‘media’, the only difference is in scope and scale. So it is important to recognize that new media is not just a change in scope and scale, it is a change in medium itself. The classic media studies analysis of this uses the analogy of transportation. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it does have the virtue of distinguishing between “mode of transportation” and “vehicle of transportation”. All the talk of ‘speed’ and ‘audience’ is about the vehicle, not the medium. Here’s how the analogy works: For the vast, vast majority of our existence as a species, the only areas we could travel to were over land. We can improve the speed and scale of land-based travel through various technological innovations- the wheel, the paved road- but they are still taking us to and from the same places. Then a breakthrough emerges: we build boats. Suddenly, we have a new avenue of travel previously off limits. In some cases it allows faster travel between distant lands, but sometimes this travel might be slower. The difference, though, is not simply a difference of speed, it is a difference of medium: we are traveling through avenues that were previously inaccessible. As a result, we opened up new destinations that we could have never reached by land-based travel alone, such as islands scattered […]