Category — General

EU Bookshop:
From science and society to science in societyTowards a framework for ‘co-operative research’ This report arises from intensive discussions at an innovative two-day ‘Gover’Science’ Seminar organised by the Governance and Scientific Advice Unit of DG RTD in November 2005. The Seminar focused on a variety of complex and hotly contested questions that are central to current efforts to move Europe towards a ‘knowledge based society’. What is the appropriate role for science in the governance of modern society? How should research itself be governed? What is the function of public engagement? Attention focused on a variety of detailed topical areas: including the communication of risk, the provision of science advice, relations between government, industry and civil society and the best ways to balance involvement by experts, stakeholders and citizens.

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here’s an interesting report.

INEC Declaration on Open Networks being forged; Community Leaders around the World to Sign / INEC / News / Home – Scin:
While “Open” is one of the main thematic angles of INEC’s Broadband Cities 2006 (Stockholm, November 8-9), INEC is engulfed in drafting the so-called INEC Declaration on Open Networks, to be signed by community leaders around the world, INEC members and non-members alike. The Draft Declaration is being made available here.
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this is really a great idea.

OLPC UI demo:
Video provided by 90percentofeverything.com

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olpc has a cool interface.

25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time – Discover Magazine – science news articles online technology magazine articles 25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time:
In 1543, the same year that Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus appeared, anatomist Andreas Vesalius published the world’s first comprehensive illustrated anatomy textbook. For centuries, anatomists had dissected the human body according to instructions spelled out by ancient Greek texts. Vesalius dispensed with that dusty methodology and conducted his own dissections, reporting findings that departed from the ancients’ on numerous points of anatomy. The hundreds of illustrations, many rendered in meticulous detail by students of Titian’s studio, are ravishing.

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some good ones.

Memories for Life:
Memories for Life is a unique project, funded by the EPSRC, bringing together a diverse range of academics in a bid to understand how memory works and to develop the technologies to enhance it.
We are our memories. Our memories underpin every thought we have, every fact we learn and every skill we acquire.
In today’s technology-rich society this human memory is now supplemented by increasing amounts of personal digital information; emails, photographs, Internet telephone calls, even GPS locations and television viewing logs.
We believe bringing together psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists and computer scientists will lead to a more effective use and management of both the human and computerised memory. It will place the technology in the context.
The challenges that lie ahead include the development of prosthetic memories, the storing and retrieval of a lifetime’s worth of memories and the issues of trust and privacy such databases will entail.
We aim to produce an understanding of what is common in memory systems and use that knowledge to improve efficiency, recall and information management across human, personal, social and work domains.
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The memories for life project seems very interesting. It is amazing that they don’t have more humanists and behavioural scientists.

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala:

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hehehehehe heh

Do you have a useful skill?:
Lauren’s starting a wiki called Help Us Help Ourselves, a compilation of how-to articles created by us in the feminist community. If you’ve got a useful skill, and particularly if you have specialized professional knowledge you can share, please consider writing up a contribution. Read more about the project here.

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people helping people do whatever people want…. that’s one bonus of living in the information age… peer to peer knowledge.

I made a new category and re-categorized my one laptop per child posts so that people can find them. In general, I am against the principles of OLPC on many grounds, mostly to do with lack of technical support, educational purpose, and the general lack of awareness or outright willful dismissing of prior work in regards to projects like this.

Notebooks dropping to $99 | CNET News.com:
Circuit City will try to best Wal-Mart Stores and Staples in notebook pricing this holiday season with a Compaq notebook for $299 after rebates, or $99 with rebates and a 12-month subscription to Vonage, according to bargain-hunting Web site Black Friday Ads.

The site posts scans of Sunday newspaper inserts before they get delivered in papers. The deals can change, but history shows that the prices reflected in the ads become a reality. Steve Baker at NPD Techworld earlier this month predicted that $99 laptops, after all rebates and specials, would appear this holiday season.

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of course…. this is already there.

A $100 laptop prototype for $150 | CNET News.com:

The One Laptop per Child project on Thursday showed off the latest prototype of what’s widely known as the $100 laptop for school children in developing nations. The only hitch is that the computer costs $150 to make.

Walter Bender, president of software for the Massachusetts-based nonprofit OLPC, said that higher-than-expected costs for the laptop’s display and battery (made of nickel-metal hydride) hiked up the price.

“The goal is to get it to $100 by 2008,” Bender said at the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, being held at Santa Clara University.

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It is partly to the right price point…