Author Archive for audreyl

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Getting Better All the Time?

Published on February 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From David E. Nye, American Scientist

Whether it’s intended to be so or not, the title of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants is a provocation to most historians of technology, who would reply almost unanimously that technology has no wants or desires. Each tool or machine has latent uses, but each is only an inert object until human beings decide whether and how to use it. In contrast, Kelly talks about technology as a composite whole that emerged before human beings existed and that facilitated their rapid domination of the planet. For him, technology has intentions, and it is radically accelerating evolution.

Kelly has been thinking about technology for most of his life, first as a backpacker wandering the Third World, later as one of the pioneers of what became the Internet, and finally as one of the founders and editors of Wired magazine. He overcame his early suspicion of Western technology largely as a result of his encounter with interactive computer technologies. He was one of several in the counterculture to move from working on the Whole Earth Catalog to celebrating the Internet as a new online facilitator of grassroots movements.

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Mind vs. Machine

Published on February 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Brian Christian, the Atlantic

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

Brighton, England, September 2009. I wake up in a hotel room 5,000 miles from my home in Seattle. After breakfast, I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, though I find I can’t understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—LET AGREED, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.

I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do.

I must convince them that I’m human.

Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help.

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The Memristor

Published on February 22, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Brian Hayes, American Scientist

When Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of the transistor in 1948, the press release boasted that “more than a hundred of them can easily be held in the palm of the hand.” Today, you can hold more than 100 billion transistors in your hand. What’s more, those transistors cost less than a dollar per billion, making them the cheapest and most abundant manufactured commodity in human history. Semiconductor fabrication lines churn out far more transistors than the world’s farmers grow grains of wheat or rice.

In this thriving transistor monoculture, can a new circuit element find a place to take root and grow? That’s the question posed by the memristor, a device first discussed theoretically 40 years ago and finally implemented in hardware in 2008. The name is a contraction of “memory resistor,” which offers a good clue to how it works.

Memristor enthusiasts hope the device will bring a new wave of innovation in electronics, packing even more bits into smaller volumes. Memristors would not totally supplant transistors but would supplement them in computer memories and logic circuits, and might also bring some form of analog information processing back into the world of computing. Farther out on the horizon is a vision of “neuromorphic” computers, modeled on animal nervous systems, where the memristor would play the role of the synapse.

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Facebook 2, Arab leaders 0

Published on February 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Sarah Firisen, 3 quarks daily

“Facebook 2, Arab leaders 0”, read a sign held by an Egyptian woman on Friday as the celebrations erupted in Tahir Square. In a sharply ironic turn of events, it seems that American software companies may have done more to bring about regime change in the Middle East than all the trillions of dollars poured into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the resulting deaths and casualties. There does seem to be no doubt that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had a significant role to play in giving a voice to the democracy-seeking citizens of Egypt & Tunisia and helping them to create a community of international supporters. If there ever is a judgement day, surely Mark Zuckerberg’s sins of inflicting Farmville and Mafia Wars on the world will be more than outweighed by the events of the last month of so.

And this makes me wonder, will people now stop saying that they don’t see the point of social media and that it’s an absurd waste of time? Of course, many of the things that people choose to spend their time doing on social media – see above comments re: Farmville and Mafia Wars – may not be the most productive things they could be doing. But, the same is true for almost everything; the fact that some people spend their time reading Harlequin romances, doesn’t negate the value of reading in general.

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Cyberspace When You’re Dead

Published on February 9, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Rob Walker, The New York Times

Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others and artifacts of your life like photographs, journals, letters. Even if you haven’t made such arrangements, all of this will get sorted one way or another, maybe in line with what you would have wanted, and maybe not.

But many of us, in these worst of circumstances, would also leave behind things that exist outside of those familiar categories. Suppose you blogged or tweeted about this article, or dashed off a Facebook status update, or uploaded a few snapshots from your iPhone to Flickr, and then logged off this mortal coil. It’s now taken for granted that the things we do online are reflections of who we are or announcements of who we wish to be. So what happens to this version of you that you’ve built with bits? Who will have access to which parts of it, and for how long?

Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that’s partly because what we do online still feels somehow novel and ephemeral, although it really shouldn’t anymore. Or maybe it’s because pondering mortality is simply a downer. (Only about a third of Americans even have a will.) By and large, the major companies that enable our Web-articulated selves have vague policies about the fate of our digital afterlives, or no policies at all. Estate law has only begun to consider the topic. Leading thinkers on technology and culture are understandably far more focused on exciting potential futures, not on the most grim of inevitabilities.

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Caught in the web

Published on February 2, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Ben Hammersley. Financial Times.com

The internet has come a long way since Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, turned on the first web server in Geneva on Christmas day 1990. Today, 2bn people are online; 800m of them are on Facebook. Every minute, 24 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube. Google, a company founded only 15 years ago, has a market capitalisation just short of $200bn and a mission statement that it intends “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” – something no one thinks unlikely or even remarkable. We now bank, shop, communicate, work and date through the internet. The internet has come of age. It is as defining an achievement for humanity as the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution.

But as the web’s youthful potential and teenage brashness give way to a more grown-up, complicated and multifaceted personality, our reaction to it has also changed. Our enthusiasm is tempered by a realisation that it is not simply an exciting force for good, as it was first seen. This year’s opening salvo of books about the internet does not laud web entrepreneurs or predict jetpacks and digital utopia. Instead, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion and John Brockman’s collection of essays all soberly assess the current state of the internet and ask: are the changes the internet brings to our society and our human nature actually beneficial?

I first went online as a 12-year-old in 1988. The web had not yet been invented but by dialling into bulletin boards – message boards accessed by dialling a special number with a modem – I could join a tiny community of people who knew that they weren’t just going to change the world, they had invented a new one. In his 1994 book, The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold, the writer and historian of the early internet, wrote of one of these new online worlds called “The WELL”: “There’s always another mind there. It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers … except that instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are.”

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Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society

Published on January 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

Edited by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope and Karim Gherab-Martin

Analyzing the relationship between digital technologies and society, this book explores a wide range of complex social issues emerging in a new digital space. It examines both the vexing dilemmmas with a critical eye as well as prompting readers to think constructively and strategically about exciting possibilities.

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2011 Technology Conference Dinner – Reserve Your Tickets Now

Published on January 31, 2011 in Conference, Headline, Newsletter and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Please join us at the Epelde & Mardaras Gallery to enjoy a traditional Basque Country Dinner. The menu includes Mussels in Basque Sauce, Fish Soup, Tenderloin with Peppers, and Basque Flan. Vegetarian options are available.

For more information please visit our web-site.

The Greek Engineer who Invented the Steam Engine 2,000 Years Ago

Published on January 28, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From Mad Science

Almost two millennia before the rest of humanity entered the industrial age, the Greek inventor Hero invented the steam engine, wind-powered machinery, and theories of light that couldn’t be improved for centuries. And then he invented some really crazy stuff.

Scientific geniuses have to pull off a tricky balancing act before they’re even born. Great minds like Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton were born at precisely the right time for their ideas to be really revolutionary – just far enough ahead of their time to be trailblazers, but not so far ahead that people had no idea what they were talking about.

Hero of Alexandria

Hero, or Heron, of Alexandria, on the other hand, had the astonishing bad taste to be born around 10 CE, which made his inventions so far ahead of their time that they could be of little practical use and, in time, were forgotten. If he had been born in, say, 1710, his engineering prowess and incredible creativity might have made him the richest person in the world. As it is, he’ll just have to settle for the posthumous reputation of being the greatest inventor in human history. Seriously, unless you invent a warp drive tomorrow, there’s no way you’re catching up to Hero.

We know precious little about where Hero came from, and it’s only in the last century that we actually became certain which century he lived in. The best guess is that he was an ethnic Greek born in Egypt in the early decades of the first century CE, one of the many people whose ancestors had emigrated from Greece after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

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While You Were Out: Apple’s Years With and Without Steve Jobs

Published on January 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Sam Grobart, The New York Times

Steve Jobs’s announcement on Jan. 17 that he would take his second medical leave from Apple in three years raised questions about how Apple would fare without its chief executive. A look at Apple’s products shows what effect Mr. Jobs has had on the company. Sam Grobart, The Times’s personal technology editor, provides audio commentary.

To See The Timeline….