The Timeless Genius of Kodak’s George Eastman

Published on January 21, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Harry McCracken, Technologizer

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an exceptionally good post with an exceptionally good title: “The Triumph of Kodakery.” Inspired by the sad news that Eastman Kodak may be on the verge of bankruptcy, he points out that the dream the company was built on–making photography so effortless that it’s everywhere, and enjoyed by everybody–is hardly in trouble. It’s just that its purest expression today is the camera phone, not a Kodak camera that takes Kodak film that’s processed by a Kodak lab.

The dream originated in the brain of the gentleman in the above photo, George Eastman (1854-1932). He was the founder of Eastman Kodak, and he didn’t just start one of the most important companies in the history of consumer technology products. He played as important a role as anyone in inventing the idea of consumer technology products.

Even more than such other pioneering technologist-entrepreneurs as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford, Eastman seems astoundingly contemporary. If he showed up in Silicon Valley today, he’d be right at home. (Actually, he might have as good a shot as anyone at fixing what ails Kodak.) More…

Image via Technologizer.com

A Brief History of Kodak, American Tech Icon

Published on January 19, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Amy-Mae Elliott, Mashable.com

High school drop out and bank clerk George Eastman’s technological breakthrough in the late 1870s and 1880s was the development of dry film.

Previous to Eastman’s invention, photography was an expensive, cumbersome and messy hobby. Cameras were enormous and the wet film required processing straight away.

In September 1888, New York-based Eastman registered the made-up brand name “Kodak” and offered the first branded camera, a handheld box-shaped model sold with the promise, “You press the button – we do the rest.” More…

Difference Engine: End of the Landline?

Published on January 17, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

By N.V., from The Economist

WHILE the panoramic view of ocean, mountains and city never ceases to enthrall, living half way up a hillside, over three miles (five kilometres) from the nearest telephone exchange, means putting up with a pretty awful DSL internet connection. Even in the still of the night, download speeds rarely top 700 kilobits a second. Yes, cable television snakes its way through the hillside community. But, no, swapping excellent satellite television for abysmal cable—just to get faster broadband—would be the worst of all possible deals. Fibre-to-the-kerb? If only.

Indeed, having waited fruitlessly for years for Verizon to lay its long-promised FiOS optical fibre to his front door, your correspondent finally abandoned all hope last year. When tackled, an engineer servicing a neighbour’s telephone confided that the carrier had ceased rolling out fibre, other than in a handful of inner-city areas where it was under contract to do so. In other words, DSL users beyond the suburbs were on their own.

The admission was half expected. Ever since the world’s larger carriers followed the lead set by NTT DoCoMo in Japan, it had become clear that the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless standard was going to be the wave of the future—and not just for mobile communications. More…

Image from The Economist

Revista Internacional de Tecnología, Conocimiento y Sociedad

Published on January 14, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

La Revista Internacional de Tecnología, Conocimiento y Sociedad, Volumen 1, Número 1 has now been published.

Contents of this issue:

Técnica, Normatividad y Sobrenaturaleza
Ontología Para un Mundo de Artefactos
Jesús Vega Encabo

El Esfuerzo de Vivir Ocioso
Carlos Mellizo

La Innovación Orteguiana en la “Circunstancia” Tecnológica Contemporánea
Un Análisis Crítico 75 Años Después
Ramón Queraltó

Técnica y Pensamiento en Ortega y Gasset
Alejandro Martinez Carrasco

Razón Vital de la Técnica
Ignacio Sánchez Cámara

La Técnica como Manera Humana de Forjar la Vida
Perspectivas filosófico-pedagógicas de la “Meditación de la técnica”
Margarida I. Almeida Amoedo

Ortega contra Pero Grullo
Estrategias retóricas en Meditación de la Tecnica
Thomas Mermall

La Filosofía de la Educación de Ortega y Gasset
Una crítica indirecta a las modas pedagógicas de hoy
Inger Enkvist

Para una Ética Orteguiana de la Técnica
Monsieur Homais, el gitano y el esquimal como paradigmas
Béatrice Fonck

The Internet Gets Physical

Published on January 13, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times

THE Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.

But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

To Read More…

Image via The New York Times

Technology Journal, Volume 7, Issue 4 now available

Published on January 12, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

technology_frontThe fourth issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society has now been published.

Volume 7, Issue 4 contains:

Jedi v. Orc

Published on January 8, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

T.C., The Economist

CALLING “World of Warcraft” (WoW) a mere video game is seriously underselling it. The virtual world, in which millions of players cooperate to conduct quests, delve into dungeons and slay dragons, is both a commercial and cultural phenomenon.

Released in 2004, the game has now more than 10m active players, each of whom pays a monthly fee ($13-15 in America). Industry analysts estimate that Activision-Blizzard, the game’s publisher, rakes in annual revenues of well over $1 billion from WoW alone. On top of that are sales of “expansion packs” for the game, which come out roughly every two years.

But WoW is not just about playing online. An annual convention in Anaheim, California, called “BlizzCon”, attracts tens of thousands of WoW fans. There are popular sidelines in novelisations, comic books and card games. Occasionally, there is even talk of a film.

To Read More…

Image via The Economist

Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing

Published on January 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times

Dharmendra S. Modha of I.B.M. leads a team developing chips that structurally resemble the brain.

Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.

To Read More…

Image: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News

Jack Goldman, Founder of Xerox PARC, Dies

Published on December 31, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Robert McMillan, Wired

Jacob “Jack” Goldman — the man who founded the lab that pretty much invented the personal computer as we know it — has died at age 90.

Goldman was the Xerox Chief Scientist who in 1969 proposed that the company create a pure research laboratory that would put Xerox in the same league as IBM and AT&T, whose Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs facilities are now legendary.

The result was Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) — the birthplace of the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming.

To Read More…

Image: Xerox via Wired.com

Finalists for the International Award for Excellence

Published on December 29, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

technology_frontCongratulations to all of the Award finalists: