http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html "Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts, giving birth to the mind." ]]> Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:15:46 -0700 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2004496-41c1-11e1-a1bf-00144feab49a.html#axzz1keb5eZxX/the-god-gap-ftcom The God Gap: http://t.co/gkEY64dU ]]> Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:35:55 -0700 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2004496-41c1-11e1-a1bf-00144feab49a.html#axzz1keb5eZxX/the-god-gap-ftcom http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government. Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism. We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy. Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising… ]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:32:57 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/196170 I'm looking for examples of websites that have successfully enhanced a research community (academic or artistic) with a dynamic online/social/mutual-portfolio presence. Blog and social media based hubs, perhaps, that showcase the possibilities of web portfolio/research integration for academic and creative purposes. I've been asked to help implement a website/blogging platform for a community of 20 MFA students.

Basically I'd like to gather up some examples of dynamic websites attached to academia (or similar i.e. the arts). These examples will be then passed on to my superiors with an eye to developing our own platform that takes the best… ]]> Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:26:18 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/196170 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which had to do with the physical mysteries of everyday human experience. Rohrer spoke about his late grandfather, a colorful man who served as mayor of a small town in Ohio and left behind a legacy that soon turned into legends—the house he had built and the interstate whose path he had altered, forcing it to swerve around his town. (“It’s like my grandfather’s dogleg,” Rohrer said, putting up a… ]]> Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:03:46 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/06/morozov-web-no-utopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet//toread-two-decades-of-the-web-a-utopia-no-longer A short #history of the #Internet (and how the #utopian dream is over) #technology #community #politics ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:47:25 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/06/morozov-web-no-utopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet//toread-two-decades-of-the-web-a-utopia-no-longer http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ 17.000.000 articles. 91.000 active contributors. 270 languages.

No matter what words one would choose to describe Wikipedia, numbers cannot speak but the truth: Wikipedia, which was set out as an “experiment” in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, nowadays constitutes the largest free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia in the world.

There is a more important aspect however, that numbers won’t reveal: Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia a long time ago. Rather, it has grown into a socio-cultural phenomenon that changed – and keeps changing- radically the way knowledge is received, produced and disseminated. ]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:11:04 -0700 http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2011/06/13/knowledge-not-the-way-you-knew-it-studying-the-impact-of-wikipedia-on-the-reception-of-knowledge/ http://artcritical.com/2011/02/28/gif-and-take-dump-fm-where-registered-users-post-and-modify-animated-images/ Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users… ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:05:08 -0700 http://artcritical.com/2011/02/28/gif-and-take-dump-fm-where-registered-users-post-and-modify-animated-images/ http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=150 Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a sociological point of view, adopting a dialectical perspective in the analysis of network dynamics might open an opportunity to question the notion of artistic intervention itself. This thread connects multiple identities projects and hacker practices of the last decade with business strategies of today, reflecting on the role of activists and artists in social media. Their interventions are thought as a challenge to generate a critical understanding of contemporary… ]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:22:02 -0700 http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=150 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by “secular society”? What intrigues me about this question is that, despite its apparent simplicity, the path toward an answer seems not at all clear. For example, are the scholarly sensibilities and the modes of affective attunement that find expression here elements of a secular habitus? What would be indicated by calling such expressive habits “secular”?

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular… ]]> Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:47:00 -0700 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars Occasionally, even experienced Wikipedians lose their heads and devote every waking moment to edit warring over the most trivial thing. This page documents our lamest examples. It isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it serves as a showcase of situations where people lose sight of the big picture and obsessively expend huge amounts of energy fighting over something that, in the end, isn't really so important.

Back in the good old days, people would just get out their swords and guns and fight a duel; nowadays physical combat has been replaced by careful inciting of personal attacks, strategic… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:46:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars http://www.slate.com/id/2258054 Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things.

In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th century: McLuhan was an academic media theorist who ended up being called a "high priest of popular culture." He was big enough to be a standing joke on Laugh-In ("Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?") to appear in a cameo in Annie Hall, to get interviewed in Playboy. One of the fundamental things McLuhan said was that new media change us and change the world. We… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:21:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2258054 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement… ]]> Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:37:00 -0700 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/12/21/digital-technology-is-not-the-end-of-artistic-trends The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout thinks future generations will consider itunes, youtube, and Kindle a more important cultural development than anything it distributes. He’s right to point out the huge change these technologies have brought, but hosting services and art aren’t comparable. Flickr would not exist without users, or to put it the analogue way, museums are not more important than the painting. After all, the building’s very existence relies on the production of work. Teachout cites Hip Hop as the last true artistic trend, a contentious statement for a number of reasons. I’d argue that while diverse, Internet… ]]> Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:49:00 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/12/21/digital-technology-is-not-the-end-of-artistic-trends http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8367957.stm Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going. Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn't plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines. Second Life is a virtual world started by the US firm Linden Lab in 2003, in which users design an avatar to live their "second life" online. And everything about this world can be customised for a price - new… ]]> Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:20:00 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8367957.stm http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604-1,00.html Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter… ]]> Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:41:00 -0700 http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604-1,00.html http://ask.metafilter.com/61272/The-Various-Workings-of-a-CubeShaped-Gallery Imagine a cube-shaped building, with ten cube-shaped rooms along each side (10 rooms long, 10 high & 10 deep). Each cubular room has 4 walls, 1 ceiling and 1 floor. Each of the 6 interior surfaces in all 1000 cubular rooms is decorated with a different pi ]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2007 03:39:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/61272/The-Various-Workings-of-a-CubeShaped-Gallery