Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 677

The Institutional Repository Movement, or, information wants to be jealously clung onto

*The lesson here: if people are devoted to their information, you can't get 'em to give it away for free, even if it costs a ton to hold on to it, and far fewer people will read it.

http://www.infotoday.com/IT/feb10/Poynder.shtml

FEATURE

Interview With Stevan Harnad

A Prophet Whose Time Has Come

by Richard Poynder

In June 1994, Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K., posted a message on a mailing list that called on fellow researchers to make their...

Data driven, evolutionary, algorithmic & generative knickknacks

*I'd rather prefer generative objects that are big as supertankers and fused out of Mojave sand by giant lasers, but, what the heck, it's pleasant to see the Shapeways crowd pitching right in.

http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/390-Dasign-data-driven,-evolutionary,-algorithmic-generative-design.html

*Makes you wonder what a generated art collector would look like. Presumably it would buy weird generated art-objects with some kind of shopping algorithm, hold on to 'em for twenty years, and ...

Spime Watch: Shapingthings.net

*It gives me a warm, fulfilled, contented feeling when these German interaction-design students have to work their fingers to the bone because of some book I wrote.

http://www.shapingthings.net/

Archeomatica: Cultural Heritage Technologies

*Those are a whole lot of "cultural heritage technologies."

http://www.archeomatica.it/call-for-papers

"Topics and trends relevant to the Archeomatica Issues include, but are not limited to, the following:

Methodologies and analytical techniques for the characterization and for the evaluation of the preservation state of historical masterpieces

On-site and remotely sensed data collection

Digital artefact capture, representation and manipulation

Experiences in cultural heritage conservation

Methods f...

Charles Babbage, rollicking fun Maker guy

*POPULAR SCIENCE put its entire century-plus archive on line. Plus, it's searchable.

War apps

https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-BAA-10-41/listing.html

"Synopsis:

Added: Mar 03, 2010 4:48 pm

The goal of the Transformative Apps program is to place the right mobile software applications ("apps") into the hands of warfighters as the apps are needed. As a result of this program, a diverse array of apps of national security relevance will be realized using an innovative new development and acquisition process.

A military apps marketplace will be created to enable rapid innovation...

The Farmville horror

*Play labor. The click machine. The monolithic block of eyeballs. The scam engine. The cognitive surplus.

*The obscure, dour, leftist terror that the exploited capitalist masses might be having fun somehow.

*Renrou sousuo yinqing, compare and contrast.

http://www.reddyeno5.com/afeeld/notebook/cultivated-play-farmville/

(…)

"With this in mind, it seems appropriate to examine the most popular video game in America. Farmville is a free, browser-based video game that is played through one's...

We are entering an age of cloud-based architecture

… although it'll be a while before we can print a basketball on our desks.

*It's a good day for architecture-fiction. Frankly, I'll believe in "cloud-based architecture" when I see some cloud-based favelas.

*And some cloud-based favelas… yeah, those might not take long at all.

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2010/02/ignite-talk-house-2-0-the-unlikely-connection-between-open-source-hardware-and-silk-wall-paper/

*Good luck with that Green Card, @mariuswatz

MIT architecture mag calls for submissions

*Architecture Fiction," anyone?

http://architecture.mit.edu/thresholds/CallForSubmissions/cfp38.htm

Today's future seems dark, dangerous and perhaps nearer than ever.

Whether it is awaited for hope and progress, or cursed for pre-destined change and catastrophic loss, what we think as future inscribes a limit onto the present; transforming and regulating 'what it is,' we 'do' as we know by 'now.'

Future never arrives 'as is.'

Without critique, future is dogma; a sovereign institution, a blind...

Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing

*Hmmm. I'd been wondering when the malignant and bloodthirsty "collective intelligences" would show up.

*Of course you knew they had to. Kind of a no-brainer there. Literally.

*I wonder if the renrou sousuo yinqing could gain enough oomph to start a good-old-fashioned Pearl Harbor cyberwar — black out the Eastern Seaboard, and all that stuff. Obviously the gangs described here are not any major departure from 4chan, online partisan blogs, card-thief black-markets, convergence-culture...