#Occupy clustering and coping

October 3, 2011

Micah Sifry writes that “Rapid growth is going to stress the #OWS [Occupy Wall Street] movement,” and he talks about similar stresses on the Students for a Democratic Society in the 60s. He notes that core bonds of trust weren’t sustained as the movement grew. He says “social media may save #OWS from that fate, [...]

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Roger Ebert: “a first-rate second-rate memoirist”

October 1, 2011

Maureen Dowd writes about Roger Ebert’s memoir, and about the disfiguring surgical failures that have rendered him unable to speak, eat, or drink – the lower half of his face is pretty much gone. Despite this, Ebert is “effervescent” but overly detailed in accounts of his early life. However he has great stories to tell, [...]

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Worldchanging Interview with Jean Russell on Thrivability (2009)

September 22, 2011

In September 2009, Worldchanging published my interview with thrivability consultant Jean Russell. I’m republishing the interview here in its entirety. Jean and I have had many conversations since, and I’m persistently intrigued by her well-grounded positive vision of a world in which we humans not only survive sustainably, but thrive. (Last February, Jean arranged for [...]

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Gamification of HIV Research

September 20, 2011

Online gamers playing a game called Foldit “cracked a key protein structure problem that has had scientists scratching their heads for years…in three weeks.” Foldit invites players to predict protein structures. The game was developed by researchers at the University of Washington, as a deliberate way to get gamers to compete by solving scientific problems. [...]

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Netflix fixes the wrong problem

September 19, 2011

Word on the street is that Netflix subscribers are fleeing because of recent rate increases; the company hopes to fix this by splitting its streaming service from the DVD service and making both relatively inexpensive. The streaming service will still be Netfix, and the DVD service will be called Qwickster. You can keep both services [...]

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Fires, storms, and the crisis of authority

September 8, 2011

Of course we’ve been tracking the fires in the Austin area, especially the massive complex fire in Bastrop, and I’ve been thinking how to make sense of the disaster. Marsha and I drove toward Bastrop, Texas Monday to get a better look, not expecting to get very close (we didn’t want to be in the [...]

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True cyborgs: “disabled patients mind-meld with robots”

September 7, 2011

Disabled patients are learning to use robot extensions directed by brain activity, currently in a limited way – but tests are promising. One hope is that “locked-in” patients, those unable to communicate with the outside world, can use robots to communicate and interact. Researchers set up a modified Robotino robot with an interface that translates [...]

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Tracks on the Moon

September 6, 2011

Nasa’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter caught a nice shot of the Apollo landing site, including tracks left by astronauts in 1969-72. The moon’s such a bleak landscape, odd that it so captured our imagination back then. Article in the GuardianUK. Then again, there’s Gurdjieff’s view: “Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for [...]

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How should the Internet be governed?

September 6, 2011

This piece hints at the politicization of the Internet and the complexity of its future. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the closest thing we have to “Internet governance.” It’s the organization that coordinates the standards and processes associated with Internet addresses – the assigned names and numbers referenced in the [...]

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The U.S. Navy has a clue about Google+

August 19, 2011

Google+ is my social tool of choice these days, feeling more functional and valuable than Facebook, Twitter, et al. This is especially true for me because I’ve adopted so many parts of Google’s web ecosystem. Via a link posted by David Armano of Edelman, I’ve just found the most clueful Google+ overview I’ve seen – [...]

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1 Semester Startup

August 19, 2011

In the first decade of the 2000s, I was fired up about the potential for an energized entrepreneurial scene to emerge in Austin, which was famously on the map as a city for new business, but didn’t really have the kind of creative entrepreneurial scene you see in, for instance, Silicon Valley and the Bay [...]

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Bruce Sterling: Augmented Reality and “Dead Drops”

August 19, 2011

Bruce Sterling’s been “Visionary in Residence” again this summer at the Pasadena Art Center, where he’s been in cyborg mode, focusing on augmented reality, or reality augmented and mediated by computer-generated sensory input. Bruce has developed an application that runs on the Layar platform, called Dead Drops, inspired by the work of German media artist [...]

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Notes on the financial crisis

August 13, 2011

John Robb connects the fall of the US Empire, like the fall of the Soviet empire, to central planning, but of a different kind: The parallels between the rapid growth of US government bureaucracy and the Soviet bureaucracy is straight forward. As more and more of US economy was controlled by a narrow group of [...]

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Thinking about the future of online marketing

August 1, 2011

Notice a lot of ads and marketing activity in your virtual ‘hood? Other forms of media are moving online, so the Internet is inherently where you go to get attention for whatever it is you’re selling – widgets, written content, audio and video, political or economic movements.  Our former research and development platform, which became [...]

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