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September 5, 2005
Here’s the fourth paragraph from a page by the Canadian company mmwave describing the Cisco 3200 router.
The Cisco 3200 Series offers public safety, (took out homeland – too American crap) security, and transportation agencies in cities, counties and provinces,
(In case they’ve fixed this editing error, here’s a screen capture.)(Thanks to Postmodern Sass for the link.) [Technorati tags: humor]
The Katrina People Finder project is up and running.
From the Bookner home page:
The publishing industry is a mess. Neither publishers nor literary agents are interested in discovering new writers, because unpublished writers are an unknown risk. Hence we have a surreal situation where it is easier for a pro wrestler to publish a book than a writer.
Bookner lets your manuscript get peer-reviewed and rated so that — perhaps — a literary agent or publishing house will notice. It’s free to writers and, for now, free to agents and publishers.
Interesting idea with ways it could wrong and some ways it could go right. (Go write?) [Tags: publishing books literature]
September 4, 2005
This is a great idea:
[Tags: katrina]Donated money? Please donate a little time. Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.
It’s easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form
After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.
The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it’s almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites – making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.
The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.
To get started please click here
Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org
Thanks!!!
The Katrina PeopleFinder Team
I’m flying back from Linz today, and then getting on a bus to join my family for Labor Day, which is already in progress. I’m blogging from the Frankfurt airport after the most thorough pat down since my honeymoon.
Last night, after the Ars Electronica conference ended for the day, there was a light, sound and airplane extravaganza on the banks of the Danube that defies description. It told the story of a Linzer woman from WWII to the present and featured fly overs by various air craft, very large screen displays on barges, and go-go dancing from the buckets of cranes. Also, a sound track so loud that it was like getting a back massage. Very hard to interpret what it meant to the Linzers.
Afterwards, 12 of us wandered through the city looking for dinner and ended up in a Viennese restaurant where all 3 carnivores at my table got schnitzel. A lovely time.
And now, as my 15 minutes of T-Mobile wifi ticks away, I “look forward” to hunching in my seat trying to avoid the aggressive adjustments of whoever is in the seat in front of me. As I get fatter and fatter, the angle of my laptop on airplanes gets more acute. I alaready have trouble inserting my meaty knuckles. Another couple of pounds and I’ll be typing with chopsticks.
September 3, 2005
Carmin “Hactivism” Karasic of the Electronic Disturbance Theater talks about artists using the Internet to create art. (She has posted links here. She talks about some incidents and ideas.
Floodnet auto-visits a site it doesn’t like, aiming at a Denial of Service attack. [This was back before DoS was a crime, although it sure sounds like a bad idea to me.]
Stateless Half Life shows you the number of refugees fleeing a particular country. Note: It’s a site you can only visit once; it bans your IP after you go. “I’ve taken away one of your assumed sites.”
[I have to stop blogging. Out of battery. Damn.] [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005]
Marko, head of design at Nokia, who exerted benign natural leadership at the Madrid conference this spring, is talking about the seven obstacles to our “mobile future.” He has thoughtfully blogged the whole thing for us. Thanks! (This the permalink, but it only leads to the intro. For the moment, to read the whole thing, go to the front page of his blog.) [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005]
This post-flood satellite image has one-meter resolution. (Note: It’s a BIG graphic.) [Found at www.Reddit.com] [Technorati tags: katrina]
Jens Hauser begins by pointing to DNA11.com, a company that creates art from a sample of your DNA.
Why do we think of bio-art as a type of art? Why classify it based on its content since we don’t think of Monet’s paintings of a cathedral as “cathedral art”?
Bio-art has changed greatly in the past ten years. We are viewing life more as software/code than as hardware.
Bio-art is increasinly re-materializing itself — less on code and more on a “phenomenological confrontration with wetwork.” It is increasinly interested with transformation processes. Body art is increasing. And it’s getting harder to define…hybrid media definition.
He defines a non-genetic, wetwork project he commissioned: culturing edible, shaped thingies out of frog tissue. It’s called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
(He mentions that this may make it harder for companies to patent culturing cruelty-free meat, but I don’t believe that will stop them; they’ll patent the techniques.)
Bio-art, he says, has become an art of transformation of living materials [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005]
Olliver Dyens says: “Art is the sensitive questioning of metaphysics…Science is the objective questioning of metaphysics. When metaphysics is changing, art changes also.”
He says there are three historical realities: Biological reality, technological reality, hybrid reality. He says we all agree on biological reality. [Really? Are fetuses people? Are people in persistent vegetative states alive? How about animist cultures?]
Technological reality is the perception of the world through human and machine senses. We see more than just the biological slivver of reality.
Hybrid reality (he says) is the intrusion of technological reality into what we consider to be exclusively human: The soul, consciousness, etc.
Digital art is the production of hybrid reality. Virtual reality is the most intense questioning of hybrid reality. “How will integrate humanism with hybrid reality?”
(He shows a beautiful interactive artwork of his.]
[These distinctions are useful, although I would argue about whether biological reality is a primitive on which we all agree. IMO, we’re conscious all the way through. I don’t think this matters to his argument, though.] [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005]
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