Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 763

Bottle Microresonator

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090729074527.htm

*It's a kind of "battery" for storing photons, and a nifty ultracheap component

that would promise all kinds of odd applications. But, being a science fiction writer,

I immediately thought "slow glass." Bob Shaw's slow glass. This guy got an

amazing amount of fictional mileage out of a very simple conceit.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=692

*You just fill a windowpane with bottle microresonators, set the stretch-capa

Stealing from smart parking meters

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/parking-meters/

*Wow. It's humble parking meter theft, the ultimate '60s penny-ante yippie

"rip-off," alive and well in a new digital incarnation! When Abbie Hoffman

did, this he at least got some spare change out of the crime.

*When you hack infinite smart-card parking time? What good is that? I dunno.

Maybe you could get some laser-cut cardboard and build yourself a parametric squat in the reclaimed streets.

Sustainably Engineered Organic

*Stewart Brand sent this via his SALT speakers email list. I appreciate it when I get something from Stewart Brand and the cognitive-dissonance is set on 11.

Organic farming teacher Raoul began the joint presentation with a checklist for truly sustainable agriculture in a global context. It must:

Provide abundant safe and nutritious food…. Reduce environmentally harmful inputs…. Reduce energy use and greenhouse gases…. Foster soil fertility…. Enhance crop genetic diversity…. Maintain the ec

Vehicle-born explosives, improvised explosive devices, assassinations, carjacking, rocket attacks, assaults or kidnappings

Warden Notice #09-09 American Embassy

WORLDWIDE CAUTION July 30, 2009

The Department of State has issued this Worldwide Caution to update information on the continuing threat of terrorist actions and violence against American citizens and interests throughout the world. In some countries, the worldwide recession has contributed to political

Spime Watch: Intelligent Transport Systems raise privacy concerns

*I wonder how hard it would be to kludge-up one of these "almost infallible surveillance systems" as a p2p plug-in urbanware app. Probably not very hard. Seems like the sort of thing a moneyed "gated community" could do as a matter of course; or you could just buy the whole system from the Chinese once they finish distributing its commie-technocrat blessings to Tibet and Xinjiang.

*Via EDRI:

=======================================================
6. EDPS: New privacy issues in relation to intell

Dead Media Beat: Dark Authentication Servers

*Digital Rights Management schemes are mediated. No form of mediation lasts forever. Ergo, the default ought to be to Gothically annihilate everything that was locked up by the DRM whenever the DRM becomes obsolete, defunct, or too expensive to run. It's like a giant cultural-suicide service.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/big-content-ridiculous-to-expect-drmed-music-to-work-forever.ars

(…)

"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Off

Free, But Bleak

*Epic thought-wrestling as Cory Doctorow (wearing the cheap spangled "Favela Chic" trousers), jumps into the mudpit of contemporary economics with Chris Anderson (in his Gothic High Tech "Economist Magazine" vest-suit-and-tie).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/28/cory-doctorow-free-chris-anderson

(…)

"Through most of the history of the industrial era, markets were seen as a fit tool for organising a small piece of human endeavour, while the rest of life – the military, volunteeri

Web Semantics: text mining with Listening Post

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=138110

(…)

"Megan Bannon, cultural anthropologist at Rapp, said text mining can't replace traditional data, but the combination of the quantitative and qualitative data they both offer creates a more holistic view of the consumer. In most cases there is no name connected to the data compiled from text mining or text analytics but that may soon change. "It's moving to the point where maybe we start collecting Twitter handles or user names on these sites a

'Friends' are not equal to friends

*Wait a minute… this Zephoria person. Do I really know her? I thought I saw her once at SXSWi wearing a weird hat or something.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/07/28/would_the_real.html

(…)

"At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one's social netwo

Web Semantics: Sphinx4 speech recognition

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/sphinx4/

"Introduction

"Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It was created via a joint collaboration between the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and Hewlett Packard (HP), with contributions from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"
Sphinx-4 s