Marc Smith of Microsoft in his Etech keynote on social spaces online:
“if you’re 1 in a million, then there are 768 of you on the internet”
On Usenet:
“It’s not dead, it may be unwell. However, [its] 23 years as a standing structure for conversation is remarkable.”
Fantastic.
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As part of the Collaborative Mapping Workshop activities at Etech, a few of us took some maps, GPS units, cameras (digital and LOMO!) and a coin around the streets of San Diego for an hour or so.
The coin was part of the psychogeographical plan. Following point (8) of Derivé [” 8. A derivé seldom occurs in its pure form.”] we created some rules of our mapping game.
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We flipped the coin on each junction to decide whether to carry on in our established direction, and then again to decide a change in direction if necessary.
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This was working pretty well until we caught a glimpse of the beach…
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Once the coin started to lead us away from the glinting sunshine-on-surf, we rebelled pretty much as a group and abandoned the coin-based games in order to head beachwards.
As Matt Webb remarked, if the rules of a game are good for one thing, it’s for finding out what you really want once you start ignoring them…
Helen Greiner of iRobot gave a keynote address this morning, Tom has great commentary.
I asked her after the event, a very specific question based on some past speculation here. A question on their ‘Bloodhound’ research project and whether their battlefield medical robots would have the Hippocratic oath at the core of their behaviour.
Would these robots that are tasked to shield the fallen on a battlefield limit their care to those on ‘their side’?
Greiner replied that they would not, and they would attend to all endangered human life, of whatever stripe. That the Hippocratic oath, or behaviour in its spirit would have to be encoded into such robots.
Update
Helen Greiner posts the following comment:
“That’s not true. I would never say this. It way way beyond the state of the art technically. We simply can’t program the hippocratic oath into a robot.
I said that the Combat Medics would be controlling these robots for the time being. If the medic is a doctor, he is bound by the hippocratic oath. If not, my understanding is that combat medics try to save ALL lives.
This work is still very much research, but we look forward to the day when robots can amplify the reach of the combat medics.”
Apologies to Helen for misconstruing her answer at Etech.
My tutorial session at Etech 2004 was yesterday.
Thanks to everyone who threw themselves into the workshop, and created some great ideas with the techniques we went through. The slide-set is here if you’re interested [caution, 7.2 megs powerpoint file!]
Thanks to everyone who helped me put it together, both in terms of encouragement, criticism and material: Foe, Stewart, Marc Rettig, and Nico Macdonald.
And huge thanks to Chris Heathcote for helping run the workshops and generally saving my life!
The great thing is the stress is over on the first day, as compared to last year where I presented on the last day; so I can enjoy the rest of the event!
There’s a surfeit of live blogging and feeds of various kinds, so I’ll probably only post things of specific note to me, rather than generic coverage…
Via Adam and Abe comes this literally chilling Fortune article about catastrophic, abrupt climate change caused by the failure/change in established global climate mechanisms like the North Atlantic Conveyor [diagram, wikipedia entry]:
“Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let’s face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decadelike a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don’t know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societiesthereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
… The changes relentlessly hammer the world’s “carrying capacity”the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth’s carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisisit is too widespread and unfolds too fast.
As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population’s adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.”
Sitting in Helsinki airport about to fly to San Diego for Etech, this feels close to home:
“Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south.”
Yup.
…because the other one is holding an ebook.
Russell Beattie seems to have outed Christian Lindholm from Nokia’s blog, which is a relief as I can start pointing to it too. A nice little observation here around e-books. Maybe he should go to Cory Doctorow’s Etech session.
“I believe that Smartphones have a good chance of evolving into reading devices. The Series 60 screen is now big and bright enough for rather comprehensive reading. Many users have read e-books on their Palms and I used to do it on my Newton back in 1993. One of the things that attract me with mobile e-books is making book/document reading one-hand operated, which books typically aren’t.”
I’m not sure it’s impossible to read a book one handed, but it’s neither that confortable for you or the book’s spine. I’m not sure either it’s that comfortable to read a book on a phone just yet, but I’ve never tried it.
I guess I was holding out for the nice, crisp, rollable eInk displays.
James has been working with ‘autofill’ scripts which reference the taxonomy of a website:
“Bottom line, when used in the current site Im working on, a user will be more likely to tag images with one of the sites 500 known keywords instead of an unknown term.”
Very, very nice; and makes one think of other structured data spaces where this would be a very useful UI widget.
“One little thought:
If complex systems self-organise, where do leaders fit in? Put another way, if Big Tony is Prime Minister because of British self-organisation, is there anything that’s his fault?”
Rodcorp, on Calvino, on New York as a story-machine:
“Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, an kind of prototype of a city, as far as its topography, its visual appearance, its society is concerned. Whereas Paris has huge depth, so much behind it, so many meanings.”
Calvino’s so cool. Rodcorp rocks.
Via BoingBoing, a remark of a Judge on the Grokster p2p vs Hollywood case to one of the content-industry lawyers:
“Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms [“piracy,” “theft”], but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that’s a very debatable question. You don’t solve it by calling it ‘theft.’ You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That’s your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.”
Petafloptimism 
