Category — General

Alan Kay on scalable group collaboration (Open Croquet). Alan Kay showed us a pre-alpha demo of some software (called Open Croquet, I think) written in Smalltalk and Squeak. The collective collaboration of Hydra + Star Trek's Holodeck + The Matrix. It looks like what he's done is create an OS based not on applications but on objects, which makes a bit of emergence possible (which, if you're drinking the Kool-Aid here at Etech, is a good thing). Quite im… [kottke.org]

this sounds interesting….

A 15-inch LCD monitor with a little something extra on top.

We're quite big on the dual-monitor setup here at Gizmodo HQ, we'd even add a third monitor if we could, but we might have to settle for the TopHead TM150, a 15-inch flat-screen LCD monitor that comes with a second, 6.4-inch LCD monitor built-into the top. The idea is that you use that second little monitor for video conferencing or for watching TV.
Read

[Gizmodo]

nifty toy, i want 3

The Banryu guard-robot.

GK, Gizmodo's new Tokyo correspondent, managed to snap a few pics at Tokyu Hands of Sanyo's new Banryu guard-robot, which is designed to prowl around the house keeping an eye out for intruders. He says, “one of the cool things with the Banryu is that you can call it from your cellphone and remotely view things it sees with its camera and control how it moves around your apartment.”

[Gizmodo]

it needs a missle launcher, without a missle launcher it is useless

Creative Commons Releases Hundreds of Titles Under its Founders Copyright. Creative Commons announced today the release of several hundred titles under its Founders' Copyright. The Silicon Valley nonprofit also opened the Founders' Copyright submission process to the public via its website. [Creative Commons: weblog]

this is good news, I'd prefer people do a nice 5 year copyright and release deal.

I get quite a few hits here from people looking for “pomes” pomes is what i stole from Kerouac's Pomes All Sizez which i read after mexicali blues. but anyway, if you are looking for pomes, here you will find some of what i think might be that, else, you might want to search forpoems on google

Innovation. This semester I'm involved in team teaching a third year subject which is known as Advanced Media Production. This is a subject we introduced a few years ago to bring together television and radio students in their final year to collaborate, and to provide them with the space to explore new ideas through the development of projects that would have an audio, televisual, and web outcome. Students have to prepare a project to present to groups for peer review and shortlisting, the project needed to be innovative, creative, able to be done (with the resources available and with the skills available) and have three media outcomes. In general the projects presented lacked all of these qualities. It is not the students fault. At no point in their undergraduate career have they actually been taught, shown, or allowed to be, innovative. Hence innovation gets confused with creativity and treated as the… [vog blog::vlog 2.0]

Teaching innovation is not an easy thing, because you have to teach something beyond creativity, you have to teach architecture and rigor, not everyone is prepared for that type of work.

What is DAC?. I'm currently the chair of this years DAC conference, and there's a ton of stuff I'm trying to achieve with the conference, and a ton of stuff (well, a few kilo's anyway) that i've learnt along the way, and I really need to start documenting some of this. For me, for others, and also so people get some idea of what the conference is actually on about. So, here goes. DAC is digital arts and culture and it is a conference series that was initiated by Espen Aarseth in 1998. This one is the fifth and the first one without external funding, so this is the one that probably makes or breaks the conference as an ongoing series. I want the conference to be serious about being a collaborative and interdisciplinary event where the papers are intended to be precursors to serious conversation. DAC specifically seeks to bring together a… [vog blog::vlog 2.0]

I wish i was going, this is a great conference.

Miss Fembot to you

The erotic futurist art of Bill Reichardt. Link – Xeni

[the reverse cowgirl's blog]

hmm, not only is xeni blogging this, but it reminds me somewhat of the film 'crash' in which she looks somewhat like the one character. anyway, j.g. ballard's books are must reads. as is reverse cowgirl

The New Chosen. The New Chosen. After reading about six Congressmen living in unbelievably cheap housing owned by a religious organization called “The Fellowship Foundation” (or “The Fellowship” or “The Foundation”) (via Fark), I became curious about the group. They sponsor the National Prayer Breakfast, but they'd rather you didn't know that – they go to great pains to give the impression that it's an official government function. (President Bush's remarks from 2002, and Rev. Rob Schenck's take on missing the same breakfast.) In March, Harper's Magazine ran Jeffrey Sharlet's first-person account on being a Fellowship neonate, in which he describes the group's organizational structure (which takes its clues from terrorists, Hitler, and the Mafia). In 2002 the Los Angeles Times published an examination of the Foundation's political activities (hosted at toobeautiful.org, which recounts an interesting episode in which three Congressmen, all Fellowship members, take the opportunity to proselytize to a foreign head of state while on official government business. [more inside] [MetaFilter]

i find this extremely worrisome. sure there are always rumors of christian conspiracies, but most people think they are pretty dead topics, but then you start see them underwriting people's lives and actions, and then you have problems….

Boing Boing is blogging ETCon, and O'Reilly is covering as well. Alan Kay, Howard Rheingold, Megnut and a bunch of other smart, interesting people… also on IRC chat… [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

nifty, now if someone would tell me what the irc server and channel is….