Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 676

Design Fiction from the New Ecology of Things

*These Art Center student projects are chock-full of off-the-wall spimey goodness.

http://www.philvanallen.com/2009/04/new-ecology-of-things-class-anti-homogenous/

Music break: Beeple drumbot

*"Scanning for total sweetness." Yes, that's very amusing, Beeple.

*Forging new frontiers in phoney-baloney laser-zapping techno-music design-fiction. Nice whiplash video editing, too.

*via @makezine

instrumental video nine from beeple on Vimeo.

Ellen Allien interview

*Ellen is a joint-smoking techno DJ capitalist from Berlin. Also, she makes clothes.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1168

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Does right now feel like a new beginning for BPitch?

It's not a new beginning. It's just that we have time now to push other people. For us, it's good. We had a good period, we pushed each other very high. It was very beautiful to see, the socialism thing was very interesting to see how the artists changed when everyone was busy. You're not so close anymore...

Austin prevails

*We've got a messed-up climate, and we're beset with peevish idiots who can't believe their own eyes about it, and will likely die in denial. But: we're not done yet. The rains still come.

*The tribes of SXSW are gathering, the clouds are lifting and it looks gorgeous out there.

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/big-swing-in-lake-levels-333105.html

"Late last summer, Central Texas faced a near emergency. Wracked by unrelenting heat and deprived of regular rainfall for two years, the...

Dead Media Beat: 'Digital Rosetta Stone'

*That's unusual: a stone made of vaporware.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8172568.stm

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'Future imperative'

Researchers working in Japan say they might have the breakthrough archivists are praying for - a sealed permanent memory bank that will be easily readable now and far into the next millennium.

The team, led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda of Tokyo's Keio University, has proposed storing data on semiconductor memory-chips made of what he describes as the most stable material on the...

Dead Media Beat: the 100-Year Storage Problem

*SNIA is the Storage Networking Industry Association, "made up of some 400 member companies spanning the global storage market."

http://www.snia.org/forums/dmf/programs/ltacsi/100_year/problem

Although corporate and legal issues have recently brought data archiving to the light of day, the problems associated with preserving digital information are not new. Archiving for a few years is hard enough, but when requirements dictate that data be retained for longer, problems with media...

Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities

http://www.dariah.eu/

What is DARIAH?

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is a project to support the digitisation of arts and humanities data across Europe. (((Strictly speaking, that should be "DRIAH." Maybe history was dry enough already.)))

DARIAH brings together researchers, information managers and information providers. It gives them a technical framework that enables enhanced data-sharing among research communities. (((One quails at the awesome power ...

The Research Data Access and Preservation Summit

http://www.asis.org/Conferences/IA10/ResearchDataAccessSummit2010.html

Research Data Access and Preservation Summit

An ASIS&T Summit

Phoenix, AZ | Hyatt Regency | April 9-10, 2010

In cooperation with the Coalition for Networked Information

Desired outcomes are:

Identification of exemplar data management systems

Identification of opportunities for federation across institutional repositories

Identification of interoperability mechanisms at technology, social, and legal levels (((Good luck with ...

Dead Media Beat: High Energy Physics data

*When the data firehose stops gushing…

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000770

When the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory shut down in April 2008, it brought an end to almost nine years of taking data on the decays of subatomic particles called B mesons.

But that was hardly the end of the story for the 500 scientists working on the experiment. In November they celebrated the publication of their 400th paper, and they expect the next few years will yield at least ...

The Second Life real-estate bubble is holding just fine, thanks

*Like the man says, sure beats working at Circuit City.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/07/AR2010030703524.html

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Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life's economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last...