Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Dangerous Minds | Speed-Speed-Speedfreak: Mick Farren


Legendary rock journalist, performer, novelist and countercultural gadfly since the 60s, Mick Farren discusses his newest book, Speed-Speed-Speedfreak (Feral House). Elvis Presley, The Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, the Beatles, Hank Williams, the Manson Family, Jack Keroauc, Johnny Cash, JFK, Adolph Hitler: all of the above were, at one time or another, to put it bluntly, speedfreaks.




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Friday, July 30, 2010

YouTube - The Flower

YouTube - The Flower: "The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition."

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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

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YouTube - Tim Shorrock- Why So Long to Investigate the US Intelligence System?

YouTube - Tim Shorrock- Why So Long to Investigate the US Intelligence System?: ""

Tim Shorrock Asks Why It Took the Washington Post So Long to Investigate the US Intelligence System
"With all due respect to the Washington Post—and Dana Priest and Bill Arkin are very good reporters—we have to ask, why did it take them seven years to do this story?" says Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. "Anyone who's been covering intelligence or national security in Washington knows that intelligence has been privatized to an incredible extent."

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Monday, July 19, 2010

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex


At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.




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Sunday, July 11, 2010

ImmersiveTech Explains - Augmented Reality


What is Augmented Reality (AR)? The Meddling Geniuses at ImmersiveTech break it down and explain it in plain simple English. The concept of AR has been around since 1992 but its modern form has really started to mature in the last three years. AR is even starting to appear on the smartphones that practically everyone has these days.

Augmented reality is a term for live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment that has been augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery. It takes your ~current~ reality and ~enhances~ it with a virtual layer of artificial information. The phrase 'Augmented Reality' was first coined in 1992 by Thomas Caudell at Boeing in helping workers assemble cables into Boeing aircrafts and later demonstrated to enhance human performance by the US Air Force that same year. Before you know it, AR will become as part of our everyday lives as our watches and smartphones!




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Friday, July 02, 2010

ImmersiveTech Explains - Virtual Reality


What is Virtual Reality (VR)? The Meddling Geniuses at ImmersiveTech break it down and explain it in plain simple English. There is more virutal reality around than you think. Granted we still have quite a way to go but every journey begins with a first step.

Virtual reality is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that simulate places in the real world as well as imaginary ones. It takes your ~current~ reality and ~replaces~ it with a virtual one. The first widely accepted ~digital~ virtual reality was created by the US Air Force in 1966 as part of their flight simulation training, however traces of attempts to ~replace~ reality predating digital computing can be found as far back as the 1860's when 360 art through panoramic murals began to appear.

The world's first ever Immersive Technology Summit will be held at the Los Angeles Center Studios (LACS) on October 14th, 2010.




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Monday, June 28, 2010

How Cognitive Surplus will change us


Clay Shirky teaches New Media as an associate teacher[3] at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program.




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Saturday, June 26, 2010

PLATO - An Early Online Community


On June 3, 2010, the Computer History Museum hosted a 6-session conference on the PLATO learning system. Session 6 was entitled "An Early Online Community: People Plus Computing Grows Communities."

Session 6 Description:
The developers of PLATO didn't set out to build an online community. So how did it turn into one? In 1972 few suspected that a human community could grow and thrive within the electronic circuitry of a computer. But two years later the world's first online community was flourishing on PLATO, using technologies that didn't become widely available elsewhere for decades: discussion forums, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, presence awareness, screen sharing, and multiplayer games. Today's social computing is different -- but not all that different than what existed "back then" on PLATO. This panel will explore the similarities and differences, including the early elements in place at PLATO that led to its success. How did the community organize itself? Why was it so successful? What was missing? What can we learn from these experiences? What's next? Discussion panelists are: Lili Cheng, Kim Mast and Dave Woolley. Moderated by Charlene Li.

PLATO Overview:
PLATO was a centralized, mainframe-based system, with very sophisticated terminals connected to it. Its mission was to deliver education electronically at low cost. But it became much, much more than that. It quickly became home to a diverse online community that represented a microcosm of today's online world. Much of what we take for granted in today's hyper-active, always-on world of social media, blogs, and addictive computer games could be applied to what life was like on the PLATO system beginning in the mid-1970s.

PLATO, an acronym standing for "Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations," started as a project of the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois in 1960. The original goal was to build on the mechanical "teaching machine" work of B.F. Skinner and instead see if it was possible to build a computer that could teach. In time they discovered not only was the answer yes, but computers could be extremely effective, and economically viable, at teaching large segments of the population.

In the 1970s, Control Data Corporation entered into a series of agreements with the University of Illinois to commercialize the PLATO system and bring it to the marketplace. The result was a great expansion of PLATO throughout the U.S. and the world, with systems installed in Canada, France, Belgium, Israel, Sweden, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Fifty years on, PLATO has left its imprint across a wide range of computing activities, from e-learning to social media, from online multiplayer games to major hardware and software innovations.




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Singularity University GSP '10 Opening Ceremony


Singularity University Graduate Studies Program opening ceremony, featuring Larry Page, Larry Brilliant, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil and NASA Astronaut Dan Barry. Singularity University is an interdisciplinary university that aims to study and use technology growth to address the greatest challenges facing mankind.




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Friday, June 25, 2010

BAVC Producer's Institute 2010 - Always in Season Island


For almost a century until the mid-1960s, tens of thousands of ordinary people attended the lynchings of over 4,700 African Americans that often included hours of torture, mutilation and photographs.

The documentary "Always in Season" examines the impact this form of racial violence still has on Americans today with intimate accounts from spectators, their relatives, and family members of lynching victims.

Developed at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco over the course of 10 days in early June, the proof-of-concept "Always in Season Island" in Second Life gives visitors a personal sense of the choices and circumstances that brought men, women, and children out to watch lynchings in every state across the U.S. but four.

As visitors learn about this intrinsic part of American history and share the experience in an interactive environment, students and educators can gain strategies for preventing targeting and group violence in their own communities today.

Stay tuned for more! Info at http://www.alwaysinseasonisland.com




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Friday, June 18, 2010

A Conversation with Jon Rafman


Second Life served as the setting for art podcast Bad at Sports’ recent interview with Rafman/Kool-Aid Man, where the artist’s rumbling autotuned voice muses on a series of fascinating existential subjects as we float through the technicolor backdrop of “the ultimate tourist destination… turbo-charged Las Vegas and Dubai combined. Where every possibility and combination of landscape and architecture can exist.”




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Monday, June 14, 2010

UK Pavilion - Expo Shanghai 2010


Heres a movie of British designer Thomas Heatherwicks UK Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo 2010.




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Saturday, June 12, 2010

David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve


As his career grew, David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall. He asks: Does the venue make the music? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock, he explores how context has pushed musical innovation.




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Thursday, June 10, 2010

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Saturday, June 05, 2010

Economic Hitmen


An animated interview of John Perkins, author of 'HoodWinked' and 'Confessions Of An Economic Hitman'
Copyright of the audio belongs to John Perkins.




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Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Yoko Ono: Inspired By Iceland

Yoko Ono would like you all to know how beautiful Iceland is, and how much I love the country and its people.

"Thank you, Iceland and Icelanders for being what you are - a family of wisdom, showing the world how we can protect our Earth and its spirits."




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John Underkoffler points to the future of UI


Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak -- the real-life version of the film's eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow's computers will be controlled?




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Post to Monitor 06/02/2010 (a.m.)


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