MetaFilter posts tagged with Technology

Britain Can Make It!

Miko — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:53:28 -0800

Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.

The Future Gets Closer, Part II

StrikeTheViol — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:14:51 -0800

Practical gene therapy treatment emerges. Prosthetics that feel. Circumventing paralysis with brain implants.

"ïn the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli ... Whatever."

infinite intimation — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:21:47 -0800

"They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes. In other words, it was my kind of crowd". Michael Wesch presents; The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube, and the Politics of Authenticity to the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center (fittingly SLYT) In the talk he briefly touches on and adds some update to his An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube; previously on th'blue. The gathering may have been the highest concentration of amazingly creative and concerned global citizens I have ever been around. Hallway conversations were different than your typical conversations. Instead of lots of people saying, 'You know, somebody should ...' there were lots of people saying, 'So I did this, this, and this, and now Im working on doing this, this, and this and we should collaborate ...' In other words, it was a bunch of people blessed with what I once heard Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins call critical optimism. -Michael Wesch, on the experience of the Personal Democracy Forum. Marshall McLuhan said in 1967 that today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.“ -increases in this 'information:access' gap as a trend have only increased since then... What large institutions can afford to roll out technology wise to students in a broad manner is limited; individual students are accustomed to easily adapting to high-technology gadgets, they speak digital fluently, they are digital natives. You may also find interesting this video created by digital ethnologist Michael Wesch and his 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, in Spring of 2007- it speaks on this gap (in a very watchable-visual way) There seems to always be consistently a lot of input added at his Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University blog on mediated cultures Of further note is his creative and integrated approach to using netvibes as a tool in his digital tool kit. Ps. Anyone up for consolidating all the "humanities" under the over-arch of Archaeology&Anthropology?- like triceratops encircling their young!

The virtual dice rolling has got to go.

lazaruslong — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:27:35 -0800

The Microsoft Surface was the subject of much ridicule. When Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade had the chance to sit down with one at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, known colloquially as the ETC, they saw potential for the Surface to become an amazing tool for Dungeons and Dragons tabletop gaming. They offered some suggestions to the team, and months later, SurfaceScapes is the result. Video. Wired Article with some more info on the ETC. The project is the work of a team of designers from the ETC. Currently, they only have a basic Game Master tool set programmed, but the researchers are working to enhance the player experience.

Reverse the Polarity

Artw — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:00:31 -0800

"Captain, the tech is overteching" - Ron Moore confirms everything you suspected about the Star Trek TNG approach to writing.

synthetic biology

kliuless — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:23:24 -0800

Our biotech century: the noocytes are coming... (previously)

The Wisdom of Salmon

Rumple — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:33:25 -0800

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a widely used technique of brain imaging in the cognitive sciences, allowing researchers to visualize what part of the brain is responding to certain stimuli, resulting in striking images of live brains. These days, fMRI is seeing more non-research use, such as forming the basis of controversial new lie detectors. Craig Bennett, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB, submitted a whole Atlantic salmon to fMRI analysis, and found that this fish could apparently detect, and respond to, the the emotional state of human beings (poster). Remarkable science, especially considering the salmon was dead at the time. Bennett's paper is an example of voodoo correlation in brain imaging studies, wherein some false positives cannot be statistically removed without removing real data as well. Basically, low probability events will occur if enough data are generated - and fMRI generates enormous amounts of data: "your average fMRI brain scan analysis can involve 40,000 comparisons, so even if there's nothing going on, some bits of the brain are going to seem active just through falsely detecting noise and measurement error as real effect." The issue seems to be that better data filtering and better reporting of raw and corrected data are needed in this field - less sexy a conclusion than emotional dead salmon, yet an important cautionary tale that the author found surprisingly difficult to get published, or even to present at a conference. [via John Hawks]

transcendental numbers rumble in the technium

kliuless — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:00:48 -0800

Extropy
How did life arise? What is information? In his recent dispatches from The Technium, Kevin Kelly would say extropy (cf. negentropy & Prigogine). [previously 1|2]

Live steam

Artw — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:12:42 -0800

Great Dorset Steam Fair 2009 - Heavy Haulage Arena, Showmans Engine's, Dancing Girls (MLYT)

non-flight of the unPhoenix

Artw — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:00:56 -0800

Abandoned PBY-5A Catalina Flying Boat in Saudi Arabia. More images. (via)

The Future Gets Closer

StrikeTheViol — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:02:31 -0800

The practical possiblility of augmented reality contact lenses. Contact lenses that reshape the eye. Bone-anchored hearing aids. Voice box transplant plans.

They sure don't make nostalgia like they used to anymore.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:42:39 -0800

Punctuality, privacy, dead time, concentration: all dead or dying at the hands of the Internet, according to this list in the Daily Telegraph.

Only at festivals with no Wi-Fi signals can the gullible be tricked into believing that David Hasslehoff [sic] has passed away. Insta-spoiler – the full list, with UK-centric or possibly obscure references linkified: 1) The art of polite disagreement 2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity's death 3) Listening to an album all the way through 4) Sarah Palin 5) Punctuality 6) Ceefax/Teletext 7) Adolescent nerves at first porn purchase 8) Telephone directories 9) The myth of cat intelligence 10) Watches 11) Music stores 12) Letter writing/pen pals 13) Memory 14) Dead time 15) Photo albums and slide shows 16) Hoaxes and conspiracy theories 17) Watching television together 18) Authoritative reference works 19) The Innovations catalogue 20) Order forms in the back pages of books 21) Delayed knowledge of sporting results 22) Enforceable copyright 23) Reading telegrams at weddings 24) Dogging [possibly NSFW] 25) Aren't they dead? Aren't they gay? 26) Holiday news ignorance 27) Knowing telephone numbers off by heart 28) Respect for doctors and other professionals 29) The mystery of foreign languages 30) Geographical knowledge 31) Privacy 32) Chuck Norris's reputation 33) Pencil cricket 34) Mainstream media 35) Concentration 36) Mr Alifi's dignity 37) Personal reinvention 38) Viktor Yanukovych 39) The insurance ring-round 40) Undiscovered artists 41) The usefulness of reference pages at the front of diaries 42) The nervous thrill of the reunion 43) Solitaire 44) Trust in Nigerian businessmen and princes 45) Prostitute calling cards [possibly NSFW]/ kerb crawling 46) Staggered product/film releases 47) Footnotes 48) Grand National trips to the bookmaker 49) Fanzines 50) Your lunchbreak

The Present and Future of Mobile Phones

filthy light thief — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:35:50 -0800

Jan Chipchase is employeed by Nokia in the "corporate anthropology" field, but he considers it "design research," as he's not an anthropologist by training. His work covers researching how people modify their phones in China, India, Ghana, and elsewhere, adding features or extending battery life. He also tracks how cellphones are associated with personal identity and how they are playing roles far from urban and suburban centers. In some locations, cell phone numbers are written above doorways for identification, when there is no official map or organization for streets. He also blogs about his experiences, and his most recent post, he covers the rise of "Super Fakes." The term "super fake" is often applied to designer goods and can refer to counterfeit money. But in terms of fashion products, imitation goods are more than an attempt to dupe the unknowing end-user to maximize profit. Chipchase's question, "What happens when a large % of your target market wants your brand cachet but is happy with a decent-enough quality fake?" is about branded technology, but the question can also be applied to knock-off purses. Knock-off electronics have their own following, with some websites devoted to such items. Such sites can do more than detail the successes and feature sets of imitation products, they may also add background details to news stories (the original story didn't detail that MediaTek is only now shifting to legit production, starting in production of knock-offs). Shanzhai, previously.

"We have approximately 3 million bytes of memory just used to store an image..."

Mr. Anthropomorphism — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:47:27 -0800

The Computer Chronicles.

¡Que aproveche!

youarenothere — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:49:33 -0800

MacGyver Chef, making snow and cooking with magnets at Alinea, the history of the spork, cooking in a hotel room, a poo machine, and other adventures in food and technology from Gizmodo's week-long series Taste Test.

A Geek Itinerary

netbros — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:58:14 -0800

Technology innovation will be a large part of late 20th century American history. Now the gearheads can explore the roots of all that geekdom. The Geek's Guide to Seattle is a virtual tour of some of the region’s most interesting and notable technology locations. A Geek's Tour of Silicon Valley hits hotspots there. Don't forget The Tech Museum and the Computer History Museum. Back east, there's Research Triangle Park (pdf) in North Carolina, and The Computing Revolution at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night--But Maybe Gmail

saulgoodman — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:57:51 -0800

You'll have to pry this mailbox from our cold, dead hands. At a time when a disgruntled few are turning up at town hall meetings around the country with assault rifles to defend America from the potential threat of health care reform bringing "socialism" to our doorstep, at least one small town in Maine seems to be saying, "Free markets be damned! We want access to our favorite government service whether it makes economic sense or not."

Venice in Vintage Mags!

Misciel — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:14:09 -0800

It's always a hoot to look through old issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, and with Google Books you can now do just that! But what do you get if you mix an eternally medieval city with eternally hopeful futurists? You get these mags' interesting take on Venice, Italy! Through their pages, you see the 20th century slowly but surely arrive to the canal city (or not, as sometimes the case may be...) Like, "Gondoliers Get Traffic Tickets," as reported in the September 1951 issue of PM:

"The Venetian taxi driver now is confronted with traffic lights installed along the Grand Canal. More than 400000 people travel by boat along 500 miles of canals in the city, and a huge increase in water traffic has forced the police to patrol the seaways."

(Nowadays, as foretold in 1909 and again in 1926, it's motorboats that dominate the water traffic!) In addition, the magazine covered (often with great period photos!) the rebuilding of the collapsed Belltower of Saint Mark's in 1909, '11 and '12, the city's acquisition of a a gas and steam powered fire boat in 1906, the arrival of electric lights to decorate gondolas in 1927, and what they called a "floating night club" in 1930. Not all these great ideas took off, though, like the "Venetians strolling on famed canals with pneumatic water skis" in 1948 and wacky car boats in 1963 (again, don't miss the pics!). And there are even ideas that are STILL being worked on without fruition, like what you'd think would be the rather urgent plans to save Venice from flooding in 1976, 1988 and YET AGAIN in 2002. Or the so-called Sublagunare metro train, first discussed in PM back in distant 1911! ‎
Last but not least, don't miss the strangely poignant picture of the city's attempts to protect its invaluable works of art during World War I in 1917 and 1931's gondola model you can make!

The Heart of a Global Industry

shoesfullofdust — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:50:22 -0800

The most valuable strategic square acreage on the planet? Or a modest, charmingly low-key town in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina? The BBC provides a fascinating report on Spruce Pine - the Mineral City where the Unimin Corporation mines the world's main supply of high purity quartz from the local hills. High purity quartz is essential to the manufacture of silicon wafers.

Yesterday's Energy of Tomorrow...and more

Miko — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:05:33 -0800

Peak Oil, 1925. In 2000, 20% of new buildings will be solar equipped. By the late 1990s, 90% of the world's energy will be nuclear-generated. These and other erroneous projections are being collected as part of the Forecast Project on the website Inventing Green: The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Artw — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:25:29 -0800

Scramjets are go!

Summer intern for Morgan Stanley wrote their most discussed write-up

filthy light thief — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:00:23 -0800

Matthew Robson, aged 15 years & 7 months, was asked to describe how he and his friends consume media by the London research branch of Morgan Stanley, where he is a summer work intern. The teenager spent a day on the briefing note, after polling some friends by text message. His write-up impressed the right people (direct link to pdf report). "Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen. So we published it." After being published, the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team's usual reports. Lauded by professionals, his claims were met with disagreement from some peers. (via)

The Squares of the City

kliuless — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:11:34 -0800

Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application - "His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules." (previously, via) BONUS: UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY - What cities have in common [1,2,3,4,5] - Great structures? [1,2,3,4,5] - The new institutionalism [1,2,3,4,5] - Norms and deliberative rationality [1,2,3,4,5]

Happy 40th anniversary, mankind.

sexyrobot — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:01:13 -0800

Moon Landing Tapes Found! All the videos you've seen of the first moon landing are crap. Remember, back in the day, video cameras and recorders were two different things. So it went like this: camera on moon sends footage to Australia, where it's recorded on tape (and then those tapes were lost), then downsized onto a smaller monitor, which is filmed by another video camera, uploaded to satellite, and disseminated around the world. America watches it on TV, cheers. Some of this footage is filmed off of a television onto 16mm film. This is what goes into the national archives. Crap. So, the original tapes have been found (spoiler: they never left Australia). So what, right? How good could they be, recorded back in the late 60's and all? Pretty darn good, apparently...seems recording heads were much better than the output available at the time (like playing a Blu-Ray disc on a B&W TV), and several recent projects have shown that it's possible to extract very high resolution data from these old analog tapes. How hi-rez? High enough to see Neil Armstrong's nipples get hard. (be sure to click on that picture) So when can we see this amazing footage? Probably soon.

Analog Art (mostly)

Miko — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:33:25 -0800

The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies