Global mobile phone sales continued to surge in the first quarter, when shipments reached 282 million despite an economic downturn, research firm Strategy Analytics said Friday. The NY Times reports. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 1:49 pm
Clay Shirky's posted a transcript of a recent talk he gave on "cognitive surplus" -- the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we're just shaking off now:
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge has ordered the Executive Office of the President to tell the court by May 5 whether any e-mail server backup tapes were kept for a period from March to October 2003 to cover controversial issues such as reasons for starting the war in Iraq, the release of a former CIA operative's name and the US Department of Justice's actions. The White House has been working for months trying to fend off a lawsuit filed last May in federal court in Washington by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. The judge cited what he called an apparent contradiction by White House CIO Theresa Payton as to whether backup tapes had been preserved. He also recommended that White House employees be ordered to turn over any flash drives or other portable media that may contain e-mails. The White House missing email scandal has been developing for some time now."
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Business Week magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a completely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we've been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there's something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it."
Clay Shirky's posted a transcript of a recent talk he gave on "cognitive surplus" -- the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:53 am
I've cut out most of the widgets on this blog. There may be a few more to go, but I've tried to limit to the ones people mentioned as worthy of keeping. But the page is still slow as hell. So the next... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:21 am
By Edited by Katie Stirling IT'S a hard life sometimes. Thanks to J. Simpson, of Inverness, who sent this in to win my weekly tenner. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
PEEP! PEEP! All aboard as HIT Entertainment and ThemeSTAR proudly present Thomas & Friends Live! On Stage. It's a brand new 90-minute musical stage show starring Thomas and his engine friends Percy and Diesel, the Fat Controller and engineers from the magical Island of Sodor. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Pat Stith, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Apr. 27--Records released by the Easley administration show that until recently, several public information officers deleted most of their e-mail messages to and from top officials in the governor's press office. Gov. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Additional reporting by JANE BARRIE THIS is the husband and wife team at the centre of a bizarre concert tickets scandal. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Apr. 27--RALEIGH -- Police charged a 38-year-old man with statutory rape Saturday, accusing him of having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Roderic D. Christian of 5713 Brambleton Ave. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
A MAN has been accused of trying to lure children away from a shopping centre with money. Christopher Hindmarsh allegedly tried to make a girl of 15 and her 14-year-old brother leave the mall in Irvine with him. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Tanika White, The Baltimore Sun Apr. 27--As a cross-country truck driver for years, Author Thompson often met new people on the road, many of whom became friends. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
By Edited by Billy Sloan and Mickey McMonagle METALLICA have revealed they could give their music away for nothing. Drummer Lars Ulrich says the band - who sued the music-sharing website Napster in 2002 - haven't ruled out free downloads in the future. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 11:00 am
An experimental satellite for a much-delayed European Union rival to the United States' GPS navigation system blasted into orbit Sunday after a successful launch atop a Russian rocket,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 9:52 am
crazyeyes notes the leak of 7 pages of secret Microsoft information on the upcoming Service Pack for Windows XP. Quoting: "We were the first to break the news on the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and the final RTM schedule of Windows XP Service Pack 3. Now, we will be the first to release the full details on Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3, which as we know will be available for manual update on April 29, 2008."
Israeli startup TuneWiki delivers user generated song lyrics to music playing on a PC or mobile device. The service, which was launched in December 2007, became a hit with “hundreds of thousands”... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 8:43 am
India's capital has put the brakes on a grand project to speed up New Delhi's bus network which has caused massive traffic jams in the city of 18 million, officials said Sunday. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 8:30 am
PLANO, Texas, April 7, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TGC Industries, Inc. (Nasdaq: TGE) today announced plans to release first quarter 2008 financial results on Monday,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 7:45 am
rbf writes "A girl I like at my university, a graduate student in mathematics, will be having a birthday next month. She had thought of throwing a nerd-themed party — show up with tape on your glasses, pants hiked up, etc. However, she decided against it because most of her friends are math nerds and wouldn't even have to dress up! So my question for the community is: What fun party ideas would appeal to a group of mostly math-major nerds?"
(TrendHunter.com) This super gallery showcases the cutting edge of graffiti, including remote controlled graffiti robots, graffiti chocolate bars, LED graffiti throwies and cleanvertising. Graffiti... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 5:59 am
TOKYO (Reuters) - Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd aims to raise global sales of flat-panel TVs to 11 million units in the year to end-March 2009, up more than 40 percent on a year... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 5:22 am
An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter Scale struck southern New Zealand on Sunday, officials said. New Zealand government research body GNS Science said the undersea... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 5:06 am
By The Associated Press WAUSAU (AP) - Northern Wisconsin marks an anniversary this year, but not everyone is celebrating. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Apr 2008 | 5:00 am
SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Yahoo let Microsoft's deadline for a response to its $40 billion-plus offer for the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company pass without a word Saturday, putting the ball back in Microsoft's court. Now, the stage is set for what could be a dramatic week. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 5:00 am
TEL AVIV, Israel, April 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- We would like to invite you to participate in a conference call and a simultaneous webcast to discuss RiT... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 4:33 am
rev_media tips a short article up at InfoWorld giving some numbers on the increasing Mac presence in businesses. "We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes the operations manager for a global advertising conglomerate. They "now [support] 2,500 Macs across the US — nearly a quarter of all... US PCs." Another straw in the wind: "Security firm Kapersky Labs has already created a Mac version of its anti-virus software for release should Mac growth continue (and the Mac thus [find] itself prey to more hackers)."
Asia's rainforests are being rapidly destroyed, a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in booming China and India, and record food, energy and commodity prices, forest experts warn. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 4:05 am
RevResponse offers payment for free subscription offers delivered by widget, allowing website owners to custom selected free content that is relevant to their readers. RevResponse pitches itself as being... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 3:25 am
Data center and hosting provider RackSpace Inc., has filed to raise up to $400 million in an initial public offering. Its financials seem generally sound (unlike many tech companies it’s actually... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 3:05 am
theodp writes "A just-published IBM patent application for a Software Inspection Management Tool claims to improve software quality by taking a chess-clock-like approach to code walkthroughs. An inspection rate monitor with 'a pause button, a resume button, a complete button, a total lines inspected indication, and a total lines remaining to be inspected indication' keeps tabs on participants' progress and changes color when management's expectations — measured in lines per hour — are not being met."
COLUMBUS, Wis. _ Neighboring dairy farmers in Columbus, Wis., thought Jim Miller and his family had embarked on a path to bankruptcy when they decided to produce organic milk. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Apr 2008 | 2:00 am
By Pete Carey and Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Apr. 26--Yahoo let Microsoft's deadline for a response to its $40 billion-plus offer for the Sunnyvale Internet company pass without a word Saturday, putting the ball back in Microsoft's court. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Apr 2008 | 2:00 am
A second experimental Giove-B satellite for the EU's Galileo satellite navigation project was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Sunday. The Soyuz... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 12:56 am
Tens of thousands of music fans aren't fazed by temperatures in the triple digits Saturday at the Coachella music festival. Sunday will be even hotter. Over 40 bands will grace one of five stages today. Listening Post presents photos of Uffie, Kavinsky and Little Brother from Saturday afternoon for your viewing pleasure.
(TrendHunter.com) E-paper technology has been tantalizing our minds and imaginations with each new, fascinating development that crops up. Lunar Design created the Lunar BLU which is a concept jacket... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 12:20 am
(arg!)Styopa writes "As an early adopter, I have an HDTV-ready set without an integrated tuner. Analog television ends next February. My suspicion is that the $40 set-top box at Walmart has the minimum functionality to get by — i.e. simply a D-to-A converter and not an HDTV receiver. Three years ago I bought a UHF super-antenna (I'm about 40 mi. from the towers: borderline fringe reception) and searched for an HDTV converter to pull down HDTV OTA broadcasts. These were extremely hard to find — none at Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, or Ultimate Electronics (all the local bigboxen). I ended up buying a SIRT150 from eBay, which never found a signal, despite confirmed reception (on the set's normal tuner) of both VHF and UHF channels. So — any advice on what to look for in a set-top box? Is it going to cost me an arm and a leg, or is it not too far from the $40 Walmart special? Can I use Uncle Sam's $40 coupon towards it? I'd like very much to be able to find a physical store where I could go see the signal, before I decide if HD is worth the up-charge (if any) over simple DTV."
(TrendHunter.com) VEIL is a shimmering curtain comprised of 1440 1440 Swarovski crystals. It was created by Paul Cocksedge for the Swarovski Crystal Palace in Milan. The four meter high curtain appears... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Apr 2008 | 12:01 am
Throngs of music lovers gather at the Coachella music festival, braving temperatures in the mid-90s to see their favorite musicians. The hot sun, far-flung stages and dense crowds don't stop Wired.com from catching photos of these eight bands.
(TrendHunter.com) Ever typed your name into Google and found out how many people you shared your name with? Jim Kileen, the director of the movie Google Me did exactly that when he Googled his name and... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:53 pm
Peter Preston: Some things that happen aren't very surprising. Take the managing editor at the Wall Street Journal and watch him head south after four-and-a-half months of Murdoch ownership Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:02 pm
Be it for medical or industrial ends, advances in DNA therapy have taken age-old principles of selective breeding into new, controversial territories. Vivienne Parry reports Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:01 pm
DNA can mutate and get damaged during the course of our lives, while we all inherit and pass on defective genes, explains Vivienne Parry Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:01 pm
Sea snails used to develop life-saving medicines, including powerful painkillers and drugs to control diabetes Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:01 pm
Palaeontology reveals much about the history of life on Earth - and that extinction is a part of it, says Tim Radford Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:01 pm
Our knowledge of, and ability to, alter DNA remains rudimentary, in spite of notable scientific advances and the persistent dream of genetic perfection. Vivienne Parry explains Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 11:01 pm
Underwire introduces Adam Mutterperl and Andy Ochiltree, in-house producers for the online comedy network, JibJab. They have free range to lampoon almost anything in their animated shorts.
notthatwillsmith writes "Despite never actually releasing the Phantom console, it looks like Phantom Entertainment (the company formerly known as Infinium Labs) may actually ship its sofa-friendly mouse/keyboard combo controller, the Lapboard, sometime this decade. The Lapboard is currently scheduled for a mid-June release at a price of $130, with the included laser mouse." We've been mulling over the much delayed Phantom console for years.
An anonymous reader points out an article up at Science News on a question that, remarkably, is still being debated after a few thousand years: is mathematics discovered, or is it invented? Those who answer "discovered" are the intellectual descendants of Plato; their number includes Roger Penrose. The article notes that one difficulty with the Platonic view: if mathematical ideas exist in some way independent of humans or minds, then human minds engaged in doing mathematics must somehow be able to connect with this non-physical state. The European Mathematical Society recently devoted space to the debate. One of the papers, Let Platonism die, can be found on page 24 of this PDF. The author believes that Platonism "has more in common with mystical religions than with modern science."
The polar bear has become an icon of global warming vulnerability, but a new study found an Arctic mammal that may be even more at risk to climate change: the narwhal.The narwhal, a whale with a long spiral tusk that inspired the myth of the unicorn, edged out the polar bear for the ranking of most potentially vulnerable in a climate change risk analysis of Arctic marine mammals.The study was published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Applications. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 9:10 pm
The European commercial space-launch consortium Arianespace said Saturday it would make a bid to launch 26 satellites from French Guyana to kickstart the European Union's Galileo satellite... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:58 pm
Ukraine paid tribute Saturday to victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 22 years ago while anti-nuclear demonstrators at home and abroad also recalled the worst civilian nuclear disaster Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:28 pm
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate to liberalize copyright law in the case of orphaned works. The almost-identical bills would limit the penalties for infringement in cases where the copyright holder could no longer be identified. The idea is that one could declare their intent to use the work with the Copyright Office and if the copyright holder didn't care to respond, they would only be able to get 'reasonable compensation' instead of excessive statutory penalties. Public Knowledge has more details on the bills."
By Karen Lee Ziner Religious leaders who had spoken out against the governor's crackdown on illegal immigration agree to serve on an advisory panel to watch how the policy is implemented. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
ELLSWORTH - The Western Mountains Committee of the Maine Community Foundation recently awarded $31,100 in grants to 10 nonprofits. Among the funded programs is the Maine Voices listening project of the Maine Community Action Association. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
WASHINGTON _ At a cost of up to $4 million a mile, the concrete and steel fence rising along the Southwest border constitutes one of the most ambitious public works projects in years, encompassing legions of federal bureaucrats and a lineup of blue-ribbon contractors. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
By Hal Bernton, Seattle Times Apr. 26--A major overhaul of commercial-fishing safety rules is tucked inside a bill that this week sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives. "It's still going to remain a very dangerous job," said Peter Kovar, spokesman for Rep. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
By Christian M. Wade, Tampa Tribune, Fla. Apr. 26--PORT RICHEY -- It's not a done deal, but the city's plan to dredge miles of silt-clogged canals leapt forward Friday with word that state regulators have accepted a permit application. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
By Thomas J. Prohaska, The Buffalo News, N.Y. Apr. 26--LOCKPORT -- Niagara County filed suit against the state Department of Environmental Conservation Friday, seeking reimbursement for upcoming state-mandated repairs to a closed landfill. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Apr 2008 | 8:00 pm
Team Underwire is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to keep you apprised of the goings-on at ROFLCon, the all-out, no-holds-barred geekfest bringing together web celebs and the people who love them.
Tens of thousands of concertgoers are at the overheated intersection of the Mojave and Colorado deserts to watch 134 bands rock out at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The bands, including Prince, Portishead and Kraftwerk, will perform Friday through Sunday on five stages spread out over a giant Polo field.
The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.
Dan McTeague is the Liberal MP from Pickering-Scarborough East, and he's set to become the successor to Sam Bulte, the MP who lost her job for funding her campaign to get elected and appointed Heritage Minister by lining her pockets with massive donations from the very industries she would have ended up regulating. Reliable sources tell me that he's the guy who pushed for Canada signing onto the WIPO copyright treaty in the committee's anti-counterfeiting report last year, and that any time anyone in committee mentions fair dealing and user rights, he has a complete melt-down and shouts them down.
At a recent copyright panel in Toronto, McTeague essentially read out a list of record industry talking points about Canada's supposed status as a pirate nation, characterizing infringement as theft and refusing to acknowledge user rights; saying that Canada's international reputation had been tarnished by its soft copyright laws (the World Economic Forum says that Canada's copyright system is more advanced than Japan's and the US's). and, incredibly, proposed that we should pass a law making it illegal to use the Internet to "threaten" Members of Parliament with negative publicity if we don't like their political positions.
The supposedly non-partisan Public Policy Forum is holding a major, one-sided IP symposium on Monday. Invited are the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association, and other big-stick-swingers for American-style copyright disasters. But when copyright lobbyists discovered that noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf would appear on just one of the panels, they went berserk and pushed successfully to have Knopf removed, ensuring that dissenting voices would be minimized on the day.
Iain M. Banks' dense, almost 600-page tome, Matter is set in a peaceful human-alien civilization, where trillions of citizens live in harmony, wars are a distant memory and science has progressed to godlike levels. The story starts quick and after 50 pages, reviewer John Baichtal is hooked.
Bill sez "Curly, a blogger and photographer from South Shields (in NE England) was pursued by police after they received an emergency 999 call from someone who saw him taking photos in a funfair where children were present. He ended up showing his pics to a policeman in order to be allowed to leave."
“Is there something wrong with my car or my driving?”
“No, no sir, nothing like that at all, we are responding to an emergency call from someone in The Sundial who has reported you as taking pictures of children in the play park”
“Play park? I haven’t been near any play park! I’ve been on the beach and in the fairground, and I’ve never been anywhere near The Sundial either, surely you must have the wrong person?”
“Sorry sir, but we tracked you on the CCTV cameras, got your registration number and that’s why I need to talk to you, you are exactly as described”
Voluminous is a subscription-based public domain book delivery program. Once you buy the app, it'll let you know whenever likely books are scanned and put online; they also keep a bookmarkable library for you.
There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?
Voluminous also:
* Will tell you when new books are available
* Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
* Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
* Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
* Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
* Has tools to share interesting books with friends
These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.
Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden.
Link
(via Neatorama)
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden.
Link
(via Neatorama)
