taxidermie steampunk, conférence sur le droit du virtuel, nanotechs, fin de netscape, etc.
Daily Veille
- Nestcape Navigator, c'est vraiment fini... et ca fait quand même un peu bizarre : Final goodbye for early web icon (Jonathan Fildes/BBC)
- Facebook dément avoir aidé les autorités marocaines à avoir arrêté le fake du Roi : Facebook Denies Role in Morocco Arrest
- Tout le monde s'accorde à dire que la mesure d'audience sur Internet ne devrait pas se faire par l'analyse du nombre de pages vues... mais alors comment ? Certains proposent de mesurer l'implication des visiteurs sur le site : Page View Metric Dying - But What Will Replace It ?
- Un mouvement se lance pour persuader les créateurs de ne pas oublier de mentionner que leurs oeuvres sont libres de droit dans leur testament : Don’t let your material die with you !! IP donor sticker...
- C'est le nouveau projet de Microsoft... un téléscope géant fonctionnant grâce au grid computing : World Wide Telescope presentation from TED online
- On manque de moyens de mesurer l'impact du web et du logiciel sur la qualité de vie : Is Web Technology Making Your Life Better ?
- Google fait de la pub pour son service de téléphonie centralisé GrandCentral en offrant un compte gratuit à tous les SDF de San Francisco... ca pose au moins la question de savoir si ses services ne devraient pas être offerts gratuitement aux plus démunis : Google Offers GrandCentral Service Free to San Francisco’s Homeless
- Hotmail en panne depuis 2 jours... dépendre de services en ligne gratuits n'est pas sans conséquences : Hotmail Still Inaccessible, Two Days Later
- La conférence sur le droit du virtuel à laquelle j'adorerais aller... mais à 1000 euros l'inscription, c'est un peu le bad pour moi ^_^ : Early Registration Deadline for Virtual Law Conference (NYC, April 3-4) Ends Tomorrow
- Et 4 autres conférences d'enfer. Il faudra au minimum surveiller ce qu'elles vont donner. Deux d'entre elles sont en Europe : [fr] En route pour l’amérique : Mix, SXSW, Digital Media. En Europe NextWeb Awards
- J'espère vraiment que les jeux vidéos commenceront bientôt à ressembler à ça. Allez absolument regarder cette vidéo réalisée par les développeurs du jeu chez EA... : Battlefield Heroes : The First Look
- Les traders de la City se mettent à la chirurgie esthétique
- Un Américain sur cent derrière les barreaux
- Excellent article de Jean-Marc Manach sur les différences de perception entre Europe et USA sur les nanotechnologies : Nanotechnologies : qui croire ?
- La question est souvent éludée. Mais que deviendront les données de connexion des citoyens qui utilisent de plus en plus massivement les services de egov ? Pour payer leurs impots ? Pour se renseigner sur la création d'entreprises ? Etc. : Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans
- Très jolie illustration sur ce que représente la quantité d'eau et d'air disponible sur terre par rapport à la taille de la terre... à reprendre : a) All the water in the world b) All the air in the...
- Petite mise au point sur les actions prévues par le gouvernement US dans les mondes virtuels. Contrairement aux rumeurs sur les blogs, il s'agit simplement d'observer les mondes virtuels pour y chercher les fous et les terroristes. Un peu comme quand ils surveillent les forums. Pas de faire du datamining géant ou de hacker les sites en ligne : Commentary : U.S. Government to Investigate Terrorists In Virtual…. Wait, What ?
- 20 romans de SF à avoir lus... vraiment : Must Read : The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life
- Internet, c'est l'explosion du polyamour... ou quand des énarques américains puritains s'emparent des codes du vaudeville : Regina Lynn’s Sex Drive : Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its ’Tipping Point’
- La singularité c'est ce terme de Ray Kurzwald qui désigne le moment où les ordinateurs deviennent plus intelligents que les humains... reste à imaginer un most post-singularité : Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker’s Wildest Ride Yet [Must Read]
- Daily sinfest : "Pat Pat Pat" - Fri, 29 Feb 2008
- Découvrez l'incroyable sous-culture des services spéciaux américains dont les actions sont entourées du plus grand secret, mais qui ont développé tout un ensemble de récompenses cryptiques, de codes, d'organisations d'anciens membres, etc. : Rhizome News : Patching You Through to the Dark Side...
- Incroyables photos de calculatrices des années 70 : Three-Pound Mini-Calculators Were The Wave of the Future Circa 1970 [Retro Futurism]
- Un blog sur les chiens qui se prennent des roustes par les chats... et qui cartonne dans digg : Fail Dogs : tumblelog full of dogs not winning. 3229 diggs ( !) ...
- Paint LED Art With Philips’ Giant Light Canvas
- Online art galleries visualize 2008 US primaries
- Hamster with nads of steel
- Un speedomètre ^_^ : USB Speedometer Measures Typing Speed
- La taxidermie steampunk... c'est génial, mais c'est spécial : Steampunk Taxidermy Is As Disturbing As You Probably Imagined, Maybe Even More So
Rhizome News : Patching You Through to the Dark Side...
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Rhizome News: Patching You Through to the Dark Side
“Creative geographer” Trevor Paglen began his research on the U.S. Military’s secret “black sites” as a way of investigating a new form of domestic colonialism in which the uncharted bases (think Area 51) were taking over the landscape of much of the Southwest. He began mapping and monitoring these sites, from afar, perfecting his beautiful Limit Telephotography process and taking people on tours of the regions. But soon the tactical media artist began to discover a subculture of workers employed at these sites—workers who, despite the heavily-enforced veil of secrecy surrounding their work, have formed social organizations, attend alumni dinners, and even hand out awards to each other for secret jobs well-done. As he began to infiltrate these groups, in the process of expanding his research to cover topics such as the CIA’s extraordinary rendition flights, Paglen started collecting patches used by these veritable grown-up boy scouts to identify their fraternal clans. Paglen’s new book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World documents the mysterious iconography and deciphers the bravado. The book is named after one particularly cryptic patch I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, a phrase which accurately conveys the anonymity surrounding the participants in these societies. Another favorite features the emblem of an alien head and says, in Latin, “tastes like chicken.” Accompanying the book is a website, compiled by Paglen, extensively cataloguing the patches, augmenting and annotating the published text, and offering readers additional texts and interpretive sources. It seems befitting that Paglen would make such use of the internet, invented by the U.S. government, to publicize information about its own cloaked networks. Log-on and see if you can help him unravel the mystery of the NRO Dragon Patch. - Marisa Olson
http://www.paglen.com/tellyou/index.htm
-yatta.
"Voir en ligne : Rhizome News: Patching You Through to the Dark Side...
Final goodbye for early web icon (Jonathan Fildes/BBC)
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Jonathan Fildes / BBC:
Final goodbye for early web icon — A web browser that gave many people their first experience of the web is about to disappear. — Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said. — In the mid-1990s, as the commercial web began to take off …
Voir en ligne : Final goodbye for early web icon (Jonathan Fildes/BBC)
Battlefield Heroes : The First Look
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Could this be the future of PC gaming? Battlefield Heroes has the potential to be one of the most important games the PC has ever seen. Free to play, funded by advertising, super-accessible, playable on a low-spec PC, and still attempting to capture some of what makes a classic PC title so entertaining to play: it’s one of the smartest things EA/DICE have ever done. And it’s funny, too.
Past the jump: my impressions from the GDC demo, the trailer, and the some screenshots.
(more…)
"Voir en ligne : Battlefield Heroes: The First Look
Les traders de la City se mettent à la chirurgie esthétique
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Ouf! Malgré la crise financière, la saison des bonus n’est pas trop compromise. Outre-Manche, une manne de 7 milliards de livres (9,3 milliards d’euros) a été généreusement distribuée aux salariés de La City par les dieux de la finance, à peine troublés par les appels du gouvernement anglais à revenir à plus de raison. Mais comment les dépenser?
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Voir en ligne : Les traders de la City se mettent à la chirurgie esthétique
Un Américain sur cent derrière les barreaux
"Les Etats-Unis détiennent la plus importante population carcérale de la planète selon le rapport Pew Center publié hier jeudi."
Voir en ligne : Un Américain sur cent derrière les barreaux
Nanotechnologies : qui croire ?
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Seul un tiers (29,5%) des Américains considéreraient les nanotechnologies comme “moralement acceptables“, contre 54,1% des Anglais, 62,7% des Allemands et 72,1% des Français. Cette forte suspicion du public américain n’aurait rien à voir avec l’inculture d’un côté de l’Atlantique par rapport à l’autre, dans la mesure où les interrogés se déclarent tous plutôt bien informés de ce que sont les nanotechnologies, et de ses avantages potentiels.
Le problème serait en fait lié à l’importance prise par la religion aux Etats-Unis où, contrairement aux Européens, plus laïcs, de nombreux croyants voient dans les nanos une façon de “jouer à Dieu“, comme le signale EurActiv. Etonnament, alors qu’elles pourraient être tout aussi moralement condamnable, les Américains n’en soutiennent pas moins les OGM, au contraire des Européens.
L’étude, basée sur un échantillon de 1015 Américains à qui avaient été posées certaines des questions d’un Eurobaromètre (.pdf) sur l’attitude des Européens au regard des biotechnologies datant de 2006, a été rendue publique lors de la réunion annuelle, le 15 février 2008, de l’Association américaine pour l’avancée de la science (American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS). Etonnament, l’Eurobaromètre révélait pourtant que 81% des Américains et 76% des Européens approuvaient les recherches en matière de nanotechnologies (contre respectivement 61% et 41% pour ce qui est des OGM). Contradiction des études ?
Dietram Scheufele, responsable de cette enquête, est professeur de journalisme à l’université de Wisconsin-Madison, et coresponsable du groupe de recherche sur l’opinion publique et les valeurs du Centre pour la nanotechnologie dans la société de l’université d’Etat d’Arizona.
En novembre dernier, il avait relevéque les scientifiques experts en nanotechnologies étaient plus optimistes, mais aussi plus inquiets, que le grand public des perspectives ouvertes par leurs recherches. Alors que 15% du public s’inquiétait des risques de pollution, le pourcentage de scientifiques était de 20%. Pour ce qui est des conséquences sanitaires, le ratio était respectivement de 20 et 30%. A contrario, le grand public craignait plus que les scientifiques des risques d’atteinte à la vie privée.
Publiée dans Nature, l’étude relevait à la foi le peu de prise de conscience du grand public, mais aussi l’absence de débats autour de ces questions, l’isolement des scientifiques, et l’absence d’études sérieuses sur les risques posés par les nanos.
En décembre 2007, l’éditorialiste de Nature Nanotechnology plaidait d’ailleurs pour un renforcement des collaborations avec les sciences sociales, afin d’éviter que les “filtres” politiques ou religieux ne viennent trop interférer dans la vision que se font les gens des nanotechnologies. Force est de constater que c’est encore loin d’être le cas.
Pour en savoir plus, on se reportera opportunément à la NanoEthicsBank, qui recense à ce jour 685 publications ayant trait aux implications sociales et éthiques, aux perceptions et à l’acceptabilité des nanotechnologies, aux efforts de régulation et de promotion des “meilleures pratiques” en la matière.
confiance, Nanotechnologie, NBIC
"Voir en ligne : Nanotechnologies : qui croire ?
Must Read : The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life
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bookmark this on del.icio.us-
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Voir en ligne : Must Read: The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life
"Pat Pat Pat" - Fri, 29 Feb 2008
Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans
"WASHINGTON--A new Bush administration plan to capture and analyze traffic on all federal government networks in real time is generating privacy worries from congressional Democrats and Republicans alike. At a hearing convened here Thursday by the U.S."
Voir en ligne : Congress worries that .gov monitoring will spy on Americans
Regina Lynn’s Sex Drive : Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its ’Tipping Point’
"After heating up on Usenet and relationship blogs, "responsible, consensual nonmonogamy" boils over into the mainstream. Commentary by Regina Lynn.
"Voir en ligne : Regina Lynn's Sex Drive: Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its 'Tipping Point'
Facebook Denies Role in Morocco Arrest
"Facebook said it didn't give the Moroccan government information to identify a user who was arrested for impersonating a Moroccan prince on the Web site.
"Voir en ligne : Facebook Denies Role in Morocco Arrest
Page View Metric Dying - But What Will Replace It ?
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We've all seen the signs. Ding dong the page view is dead... well, dying. First Compete announced that they would be using attention-based web metrics, or Attention Metrics for short. Then Facebook announced that they will move to a similar metric. Perhaps most importantly, Nielsen NetRatings announced last July that they would stop using page views for comparing popularity on the web, and move towards more attention based metrics. Also, Microsoft announced this week the release of a new ROI measurement tool called "engagement mapping".
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
The reasoning is simple enough: While unique visits and page views are useful in measuring how much incoming traffic a site has, it isn't exactly a good or accurate way of measuring impact or even engagement. You could have high incoming traffic (for example, any site that is hugely successful on social sites) but if there is an incredibly high exit rate and only 30 seconds to a minute spent on the site, the traffic numbers don't mean much (i.e. not all traffic is created equal). Furthermore, the rise of new web technologies such as AJAX which don't require page reloads to refresh elements or modules in a page, or video embeds (such as from YouTube) that allow you to watch a video and then browse related videos without ever refreshing the page, are making page views a mostly inaccurate measure and rendering it largely irrelevant.
While most people agree that page views are becoming irrelevant, the same people are uncertain about the future. For example, many agree that attention-based metrics are the future. Attention metrics calculate the total time spent on a site or interacting with a page (or element on a page in the case of Facebook applications) as a percentage of total time that people spend online, to measure a site's relative importance on the web. However, there are many others, like the Tel Aviv-based Nuconomy Studio and even Yahoo's Buzz, that believe using factors like comments on posts, ratings from users, number of times something is shared, and clicks on ads as a measure of how popular something is is a better/more accurate metric.
The problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you're generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks). While it is true that the page view as a metric is on it's way out, this isn't going to happen unless a new metric comes from within the advertising industry, which, with over $20 billion at stake, has the most to gain from a more accurate way of determining where to spend their money.
But it's not that simple either. As Scott Ross explains, different web technologies and applications have unique effects on different sites. What technologies you use and how they effect engagement and interaction on your site may depend on the size of your site, the niche you operate in, and a host of other factors. In fact, the metric that is most applicable could even change from page to page depending on the content on those pages. That being the case, perhaps one metric that is applied to everyone is just not enough and just not practical/efficient. As web technologies evolve, the page view is bound to die as a metric, but unless the advertising industry can get it's act together and work alongside the publishing industry, a good set of new metrics that would be widely adopted is not imminent.
"Voir en ligne : Page View Metric Dying - But What Will Replace It?
Three-Pound Mini-Calculators Were The Wave of the Future Circa 1970 [Retro Futurism]
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Except for that rabid gang of early adopters, most of us hold back on purchasing new technology; it's only going to get cheaper (not to mention less buggy). If you need an example of this, take a peek at the Sharp LC-8 advertised here. One of the first wave of transistorized electronic calculators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the LC-8 was an exciting advance in handheld technology.
At $345 (roughly equivalent to $1800 today), the LC8's price was out of reach of many consumers. But that was a comparative bargain compared to the crop advertised above, in 1969. In 2008 dollars, the prices range from approximately $2200 to $7200.
With the advantage of hindsight, too, we know that things were going to get much, much smaller than the three-pound "space age baby" advertised in 1970.
On the other hand, those of us who grew up in the 70s will never forget the first time a deep-pocketed relative with one of the new "pocket" calculators typed in the number 07734 and made us look at it upside down. hELLO!! Yeah, kiddies, that was hundreds of dollars of fun right there.
Voir en ligne : Three-Pound Mini-Calculators Were The Wave of the Future Circa 1970 [Retro Futurism]
Don’t let your material die with you !! IP donor sticker...
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Don’t let your material die with you!! IP donor sticker makes it official.
from Evan Roth & the Free Art & Technology Lab (FFFFFAT)
—jamiew
Voir en ligne : Don’t let your material die with you!! IP donor sticker...
Fail Dogs : tumblelog full of dogs not winning. 3229 diggs ( !) ...
a) All the water in the world b) All the air in the...
Voir en ligne : a) All the water in the world b) All the air in the...
World Wide Telescope presentation from TED online
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Here's the video of Roy Gould's TED 2008 presentation on the World Wide Telescope project. My kids are going to love it when it goes live this spring. Link
"Voir en ligne : World Wide Telescope presentation from TED online
Is Web Technology Making Your Life Better ?
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Technology, broadly, is a tool or set of tools aimed at making some aspect of life better, easier, or more efficient. On the web, that could mean scripting languages that make it easier for developers to create applications, or it could mean applications that make it easier for us to accomplish a task. Let's not debate the definition of the word technology, but rather, is web technology working for you? Are so-called web 2.0 applications making your life easier or overloading you with too much information?
"It is no secret that we live in an information overload age," is how Alex Iskold began his must-read Attention Economy overview that was published on ReadWriteWeb about one year ago. We're constantly bombarded with information these days -- news, blogs, photos, videos, Twitter, emails, text messages, phone calls, etc. All of these things are vying for and tugging at our attention.
So the question becomes: is the technology that is supposed to make our lives easier, actually overwhelming us and making our lives more difficult? And if so, how do we escape the negative effect of technology overload?
The latest in the compelling series of Oxford 2.0 debates over at the Economist web site (which we covered in December) deals with the proposition: If the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing.
Arguing on the pro side (that technology is complicating our lives) is Richard Szafranski, Partner, Toffler Associates. On the con side (that technology is simplifying our lives) is John Maeda, President Elect of the Rhode Island School of Design. The debate runs until March 6 and spectators are right now split 64%-34% in favor of the con side.
The Economist debate is speaking broadly to technology as a whole (which might include everything from the hammer and nail to the Large Hadron Collider), but the relevance to our problem of information overload is undeniable.
From Szafranski's opening statement:
"We--hundreds of millions of us and growing--embrace the very technologies that make our lives and our relationships more difficult and fill many of our waking moments with activity. We love--to the point of gluttony--to communicate, play, invent, learn, imagine and acquire. Information technology has given us tools to do all of those anywhere and round the clock. We are awash in the benefits that high-bandwidth fixed and mobile wireless communications, email, text messages, pictures, games, data and information give us, including instant access to thousands of products. The seductive ease with which we can engage in any and all of those activities, or quests or endeavours makes it difficult and stressful to not be overwhelmed by choices. Choosing takes time and our time is not unlimited. Devices and applications that save us labour in one area may merely allow us, and sometimes seem to compel us, to invest labour in other areas.
We say or hear, "I must do my email tonight, or by tomorrow I’ll have over 600 to read." We want to buy a pot. Search on "pottery" and get 254,000,000 results. We want to find the John Li we met at a conference. Search on "John Li" and get 8,600,000 results. Do I do email, narrow the searches, eat dinner, pick up my laundry or call a friend? Because technology has spawned numerous complex variations I must repeatedly go through the act of evaluating and choosing -- a labour of deciding. Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us."
And from Maeda's first parry:
"Recognize simplicity as being about two goals realized simultaneously: the saving of time to realize efficiencies, and later wasting the time that you have gained on some humanly pursuit. Thus true simplicity in life is one part technology, and the other part away from technology.
We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of. Patience is a virtue I am told, and I await the many improvements that lie ahead. To say that technology is failing to simplify our lives misses the point that in the past decade we have lived in an era of breakneck innovation. This pace is fortunately slowing and industries are retrenching so that design-led approaches can take command to give root to more meaningful technology experiences."
Szafranski is arguing that the benefit of technology has been overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and enormity of it. Technology may have solved some problems, but it has created others that are just as negative, or perhaps worse. Or, for example, Google gives us access to so much information that finding what we're looking for is such a complex task that our lives are worse off for it. On the other hand, Maeda's argument is that information technology is so new that we're only now beginning to refine it in ways that make it more simple. It can be a tad overwhelming when a Google search return 4 million results, but give it a few years and it is bound to get better.
This is an intensely interesting debate, and we thought it would be fun to try to continue it here with a focus on web technologies. Is the information overload that we're all acutely experiencing worth the utility we're getting out of it? Has technology on the web failed us or has it made our lives easier? What do you think? The floor is open for debate, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Image via a Geico ad.
"Voir en ligne : Is Web Technology Making Your Life Better?
Google Offers GrandCentral Service Free to San Francisco’s Homeless
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A number of you may be reading this post from somewhere around the San Francisco Bay Area. But chances are you’ve got a home of your own; whether it be a rental or something you or a familial relative have shelled out many a penny for. Which is all good and well. Having a roof over your head that you can regularly rely on is pretty important.
But there is of course a portion of the populace that isn’t so fortunate as the majority. Some of those homeless Americans find themselves “in limbo” in the beautiful city of the Golden Gate.
Google knows this, according to a report by KNTV [MSNBC], the NBC affiliate for the Bay Area. And it has chosen to help those in need the way it knows best: with technology.
The Mountain View-based Web giant is looking to give homeless people in San Francisco a phone number and voicemail, controllable through its GrandCentral VoIP system, 
which the company acquired in mid-2007. Google’s goal with the new initiative is to give a phone contact to every homeless individual in the city that is willing to accept the offer.
Google made the announcement at a Project CARE (Communications and Respect for Everybody) event held yesterday at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium jointly with the administration of San Francisco. The intention is to give those without the convenience of personalized telephone access - more critical than ever in today’s modern society - in order to more easily pursue employment and perhaps start or restart a career.
The maintenance for the program as well as any corresponding accounts created will be entirely free of cost for those willing to partake in the effort.
Voir en ligne : Google Offers GrandCentral Service Free to San Francisco’s Homeless
Early Registration Deadline for Virtual Law Conference (NYC, April 3-4) Ends Tomorrow
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Quick note to remind readers that tomorrow (February 29) is the last day for early registration for the Virtual Law Conference in New York City, April 3-4. Registration also covers entrance to the “Virtual Worlds 2008” conference (which runs concurrently) and all associated events. The price goes up $300 after tomorrow, and another $400 at the door.
Virtually Blind is a media partner for the conference, and I am one of the conference advisors and co-chairs, along with attorney Sean Kane. The conference will be keynoted by Steve Mortinger (IBM Systems and Technology Group VP and Associate General Counsel), who will be discussing “The Top Ten Things a Brand Should Know about Virtual Worlds.” I’m looking forward to seeing many VB readers in New York in April.
"Voir en ligne : Early Registration Deadline for Virtual Law Conference (NYC, April 3-4) Ends Tomorrow
Paint LED Art With Philips’ Giant Light Canvas
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Visitors at Mercy Medical Center in Rogers, Arkansas, will have a bright canvas to paint on: a 14 foot-long interactive LED wall installed by Philips Electronics as a gift to the new hospital.
Named the "Imagination Light Canvas," the display has 1,420 touch-sensitive pixel elements, letting visitors finger-paint with light. Images persist for a few minutes, and six people can play simultaneously.
Paul Zeven, CEO of Philips Electronics North America, said that it's located in the hospital's Women's and Children's waiting room, and would lessen the tension, anxiety and stress that families can experience when waiting for child birth.
"We predict it will be a big hit with both children and adults,” Zeven said in a press release. According to Philips, the device uses no more electricity than a toaster.
Here at the Gadget Lab, we think this is fantastic. What better way to greet the entry of new life than with a towering, pixilated monument to tech-facilitated creativity? I loved the whole concept so much, I made a flash version:
Bravo, Philips! What next, cellular automaton au pairs?
"Voir en ligne : Paint LED Art With Philips' Giant Light Canvas
Online art galleries visualize 2008 US primaries
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The campaign trail is alight with art! Check out these Flickr galleries: 2008 Elections Graphics, and Obama Street Art for examples of campaign posters, murals and graffiti from around the US. New photos are constantly added, so check back regularly, or submit your own examples.
"Voir en ligne : Online art galleries visualize 2008 US primaries
Hamster with nads of steel
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Brave Hamster: I know your schnozzle is as big as my head, but I call the shots around here.
Puppeh: [Sniff]
That, my friends, is one brave ham.
Karen, Cocoa and Momo, I'm sure you have adventure stories to tell us about in the comments...
Voir en ligne : Hamster with nads of steel
USB Speedometer Measures Typing Speed
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This $40 marvel of modern technology is a USB speedometer that measures your WPM. And not only that, it keeps a running total of how many words you've typed so far for the day. As you can see there in the picture the device tops out at a whopping 260 WPM, which is a staggering pace. Now I'm not saying I could type that fast, but I can. Well, if falling asleep with your head on the keyboard counts. Which to me it does. So somebody notify the Guinness people -- I want my name in the book and a plaque damnit.
usb speedometer guages wpm, not mph [technabob]
Thanks to the always beautiful Melissa for the tip"
Voir en ligne : USB Speedometer Measures Typing Speed
Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker’s Wildest Ride Yet [Must Read]
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It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Singularity happens in Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular, since the title gives that development away. But what happens after the Singularity will surprise you. People usually define the Singularity as the moment when artificial intelligences improve themselves to the point where they surpass us, but Rucker's singularity takes many more forms, and is much more confounding, than that. Here are the ten things that will surprise you about Postsingular. It's all spoilers from here on out!
In Postsingular, a maniac named Jeff Luty creates self-aware nanomachines called "nants," which are programmed to strip the world of all organic matter to reproduce themselves. But the nants don't just kill everyone, they "scan" you and put you into a virtual world, called "Vearth." The nants nearly succeed in absorbing the whole planet, but a rogue engineer, Ond Lutter, manages to plant a code that makes them reverse their actions, by making his autistic son memorize it before the nants absorb him. So the nants unravel all of their actions, back to the beginning, and restore everything on Earth to the way it was.
But Ond fears that Luty, or someone else, will try again to create nants that absorb the whole world. So he creates self-replicating nanites called "Orphids," which quickly cover everything in the world, tagging objects and turning them self-aware. Everybody becomes connected to each other via a kind of nano-internet called the Orphidnet. The Orphids guard against another nant incursion. But the Orphids also "tag" some techno-phobic giants from a higher dimension who have been visiting Earth secretly for decades, and these giants are willing to do anything to protect their dimension from our science. And the Orphidnet quickly gets overrun with spam and malware, just like the real Internet.
That summary barely scratches the surface of all the wild ideas Rucker throws out in Postsingular, which has enough inventiveness for ten good-sized science fiction novels.
Both versions of the Singularity suck in some ways, which feels much more realistic than the candy-floss vision some futurists want to feed us.
The first version, with the nants eating everything, leads to a virtual world that we learn would totally suck, late in the novel, thanks to a simulation one character experiences. The suckiness is partly because only certain people, who belong to the right political party, will actually get uploaded as consciousnesses in the new Vearth -- everybody else is just an A.I. simulation. But it's also because there's not enough processing resources to simulate everything, and trees and other features become just crude pixellated shapes. People start "having children," meaning they merge their programs to create a new simulated person, who never existed in the real world. And these "newborns" take more and more processing power away from "real" people. Class divisions in the "Vearth" turn out to be worse than the ones in the "real" Earth, with some people stuck in crappy low-res living situations.
The second version, with the Orphids covering everything with a layer of intelligence, is sucky in a different way. Political candidates launch pop-up ads in the middle of your reality, bugging you while you're trying to take a walk. (Sort of like a Philip K. Dick story I read years ago.) Viruses cover you with "bugs" that prevent you from doing anything and make your Orphidnet access crash. And because everybody can see everybody else all the time through the Orphidnet, there's no more privacy. Everybody knows what you look like naked. (The wife and friends of Ond, the Orphids' creator, become stars of their own private soap opera, which zillions of people "tune into" via the Orphidnet.The soap opera's "stars" know more people are watching when the ads floating around them get bigger.) And people get addicted to "the big pig," a giant A.I. that forms in the Orphidnet and uses people's brains for extra processing power, which gives you a sort of high.
The novel's other main plot, about the giants from the higher dimension Earth (the "hibrane,") is a bit less fleshed out than the Orphids vs. nants stuff. It does make sense, because the Orphids "tag" the "hibrane" people, but I never quite got a complete sense of what the hibraners' world was like. We really only see it at the start and end of the novel. (And the hibrane people provide the solution, in the end, to Luty's second attempt to overrun the world with nants and create a new Vearth.) The alternate version of San Francisco that we glimpse, in the technophobic hibrane, feels a bit like it's still the 1960s, which may be part of the point. (The Orphidnet is a kind of turbo Internet, and so it uncovers a weird subculture that nobody knew about, just as the Internet has uncovered lots of previously obscure subcultures for us.) In the end, the hibrane feels like just another bizarre idea-spike in a novel that's spiked with tons of them.
But in general, Postsingular actually pulls off the ambitious multilayered story it sets out to tell. Along the way, we discover a new form of meta-storytelling, thanks to the Orphidnet, and that in turn leads to a new way of looking at reality. (One of Rucker's main characters, Thuy, is writing a meta-novel using the Orphidnet to assemble all her experiences. This turns out to unlock the hidden means of travel to the "hibrane" higher dimension.) After reading a novel about a meta-novel, in which everything gains significance from its connection to everything else, you're left feeling as though the Singularity is a lot more complex than you'd previously guessed. And, maybe, just a tad closer than you'd expected.
You can read the novel for free on Rucker's site, but you'll probably want to break down and get a hard copy at some point, so you can dog-ear pages and skip back and forth. [Postsingular]
Voir en ligne : Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker's Wildest Ride Yet [Must Read]
Commentary : U.S. Government to Investigate Terrorists In Virtual…. Wait, What ?
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The government may run a research project on public data in games. Yawn.
I was really hoping not to cover this, but the coverage I keep seeing is so over-the-top (e.g. TERRORISTS IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT!) that, having actually read the report in queston, I’d be remiss not to at least briefly comment.
Here’s the real story of the Reynard Project (”Reynard” is a trickster fox from medieval European folklore and literature) from the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to Congress (.pdf) that sparked the firestorm (report found via Wired’s Threat Level blog, emphasis is mine):
Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community.
The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.
[…]
Reynard will conduct unclassified research in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and will begin with observational studies to establish baseline normative behaviors.
So basically, they’re going to be standing on a virtual street corner noting how anonymous users interact and compiling data on that to try to establish a set of baselines from which they could, later, maybe spot deviations.
Commentary
This is simply not what everyone is making it out to be. The government is not investigating terrorists in World of Warcraft. They are not getting chat logs from providers. They are not secretly monitoring conversations. They’re just using cheap public data to see if they can spot patterns.
For another take on this, Juan Cole over at Salon debunks the idea of looking for terrorists in games pretty completely, but that article misses the much simpler point that that’s not even what they’re doing here. Not yet, anyway.
I think this is potentially pretty smart on the part of the analysts, and at least as written, it doesn’t raise privacy flags for me. They just appear to be hoping to mine the massive pile of conveniently anonymous publicly available data games produce regarding “social, behavioral, and cultural norms.” They hope this will, in the aggregate, eventually reveal patterns that they can apply later.
So, for example, they could learn that guild recruitment in a game typically follows a pattern of contact with a recruit that goes (a) leader, (b) third in command, (c) second in command, (d) leader. Not always, but often enough to be notable. They could then run that data over later contact patterns to try to spot apparent attempts at recruitment. They’re not going to be kicking in doors based on this kind of analysis, but it’s another data point, and collecting data points is what (typically boring) intelligence work is really all about.
There often good reason to suspect that a program like this will go beyond it’s intended scope, but this just doesn’t have that feel to me. They’ve got an internal group advocating privacy issues, and the idea is to do all of this (at least at this stage) with publicly available data. If that’s all it is, I don’t really care. Sure, there’s a chance it’d go beyond the plan laid out here at some point, but that’s true of every program, and seems less true for this one than many. Privacy advocates have to pick their battles.
At bottom, it’s definitely a long shot, but they could get data they simply cannot get in the real world, at minimal cost and zero risk. It’s odd to think of analysts studying colonies of gamers like scientists study beehives, but if it stays at the macro and/or anonymous level and uses only public data, I sort of have to shrug. They’re not looking for terrorists in games, they’re just looking for social patterns that they can extrapolate from. That’s boring, and makes a lousy headline, but it’s really not all that bad — and not all that dumb.
"Voir en ligne : Commentary: U.S. Government to Investigate Terrorists In Virtual…. Wait, What?
[fr] En route pour l’amérique : Mix, SXSW, Digital Media. En Europe NextWeb Awards
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A peine rentré de congés, mes emails, lus, mon lecteur RSS vidangé, mon netvibes digéré, Twitter ré-engrangé me voilà reparti pour deux semaines pour les Etats Unis. J’y pars notamment pour assister à certaines conférences dont celle très attendue de Microsoft (Merci d’ailleurs à toute l’équipe pour l’invitation) à Las Vegas du nom de Mix ou de nombreuses annonces importantes vont être faites.
Direction ensuite à SXSW (South by SouthWest): conférence discrète mais de très haut niveau qui a lieu en plein coeur du Texas à Austin (oui Austin pas en Californie) et qui avait donné vitrine à une application désormais très populaire: Twitter. Cette conférence est très orientée sur le contenu avec des personnes ayant une expérience terrain très approfondie. Mark Zuckerberg et Michael Eisner viendront y faire un discours.
Puis enfin direction New York au Digital Media Summit sans organisé par Mc Graw Hill sur les nouveaux contenus interactifs. Ce sera aussi l’occasion de rencontrer quelques bloggers stars comme Fred Wilson, Allen Stern et Loren Feldman (1938Media) sans oublier bien sûr mon collègue Erick Schonfeld de TechCrunch.
Entre temps chez nous, alors que Plugg se prépare en Belgique, TechCrunch France et TechCrunch UK se sont associés à d’autres bloggeurs européens pour soutenir le Next Web Awards qui va désigner nos entreprenautes européens stars. NextWeb est un évènement internet qui lieu en Hollande mais aussi un blog très riche sur l’internet. A vos souris donc (vous avez jusqu’au 10 mars)
En perspectives pas mal d’annonces, de scoops de hot news…
Promo: Gagnez une XBox et 200 euros sur Zlio
"Voir en ligne : [fr] En route pour l’amérique: Mix, SXSW, Digital Media. En Europe NextWeb Awards
Hotmail Still Inaccessible, Two Days Later
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Microsoft’s Hotmail is still down for millions of users across the globe, two days after the problem first reared its ugly head. Earlier this week, we heard that Microsoft users were unable to login to their accounts. If you were already logged in, then the problem wouldn’t have been too severe at the time.
But two days later? For most users, there may be a very good chance that you’ve needed to log out of Hotmail since the issue first began. That means that the problem has been compounded. A lot. While Microsoft has previously stated that the issue has been resolved, according to a Times Online report, there are still millions of users, especially in Europe, that still cannot access their Hotmail accounts.
I can’t imagine how debilitating my work day at Mashable would become if email completely failed, so I’m not surprised at the response Microsoft is receiving from some of its users. Many are leaving Hotmail for other free email clients, like Yahoo or Gmail. According to The Times Online, some users have cited Hotmail’s unreliability and spam as being too much, and this most recent ordeal is literally the last straw.
We saw how harmful inaccessibility was for Skype, so hopefully Microsoft can get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. And perhaps handle the current situation a little better? It appears that many users feel that Microsoft is taking the inaccessibility to Hotmail too lightly, and we’ve yet to hear a substantial explanation from Microsoft as to why the issue arose in the first place.
Voir en ligne : Hotmail Still Inaccessible, Two Days Later
Steampunk Taxidermy Is As Disturbing As You Probably Imagined, Maybe Even More So
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I love steampunk. I don't love steampunk taxidermy. The two go together about as well as my privates and a spiked bat. Which, from experience, is a painful match up. I'm sure there are some of you out there that can really appreciate these, but you're sickos. One more of a ferret after the jump, but you'll have to hit the gallery link to see the rest, I have morals and principles (not really) that prevent me from posting them myself. That said, I still want the Beaver PC."
Voir en ligne : Steampunk Taxidermy Is As Disturbing As You Probably Imagined, Maybe Even More So