Nailchipper

The American auto industry epitomizes many of the issues I have with large institutions– they are wasteful and unresponsive, but worst of all, we depend on them. Few things are as unsettling as forced dependence.
Yet, we are in the midst of yet another bailout by US government - again, by institutions deemed “too big [...]

I will be attending the Convergence08 conference in a few weeks, so in the spirit of the topic I want to jot down a few notes concerning the Singularity. First of all, let me start by describing what I have to come to understand as the Singularity. The Singularity was proposed by Vernor Vinge in [...]

Orwell is too easily referenced, but this reassuring statement about the current financial crisis - made solely to avoid panic - is too glaring to pass over:
And in comments to reporters at the White House, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., said that consumers should remain confident about the soundness of the American [...]

Aaron Swartz recently wrote:
Utilitarians believe that people should work to maximize total happiness across the population. They believe that the only reason to do something or not to do something is because it will make people happier or unhappier respectively. Thus, whether something is good or bad depends to some extent on people’s preferences — [...]

In the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr wrote piece titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises interesting issues regarding the effects of Google on the way we read. Carr looks at history for significant technological shifts and its reception. One of the oldest - and I think most interesting - is [...]

One of the best experiences in my life was working with a puma in South America. It required me to run in the jungle for close to 8 hours a day through the most hazardous “trails” imaginable. The point was to try and give these - often injured - cats a healthy and active [...]

Nationalism appears to be on the rise again. But this time around, it looks to be a gentler breed: proud, pragmatic and less antagonistic.
The world feels like it’s slowly congealing, not into a sort of gray homogeneous mush, but into a diverse federation of cultures that identify strongly with their heritage and decidedly work together [...]

But Google depends crucially and directly on the content created by users and more generally on the goodwill of the Internet community.
Equally, so do the many products Google creates and gives away, with no obvious path to future profit.
So, more than in the past, it makes sense for corporations to cultivate diffuse goodwill, rather than [...]

Joshua Heineman started an interesting project called Reaching for the Out of Reach. The basic idea is to bring new life and a new audience to interesting works of our past. He’s using the New York Public Library website as his source for digging up digitized stereographs and quickly alternating between the two images, simulating [...]

I imported my posts from the Future of the Book. I haven’t had a to chance to import the comments but I will possibly do that at some point in the future.  I’ve also been developing a new WordPress plugin that allows users to reorder the posts on my blog by simply dragging and dropping. [...]

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip through South America. I started in Argentina and made my way north, through Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, eventually flying back home from Lima.
But now, I am back in the States and enjoying transitioning back to normal life.  I hope to develop a few projects that have [...]

I live in Facebook land, but frequent a summer home in the Wikipedia islands. Where do you live?

I’ve never been a big fan of zoos. When I visit them I feel horrible for knowing what these animals must endure (like the polar bear I saw in Central Park licking a block of ice on a hot summer day) and then feel guilty for getting pleasure out of seeing these awesome creatures. But [...]

CommentPress has been getting really nice attention: Kathleen Fitzpatrick recently published “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” with the Journal of Electronic Publishing at University of Michigan this fall.

This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on CommentPress!
Here is a quote:
With CommentPress, released in July by the Institute for the Future of the Book, designers have endeavored to help digital books capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin
note. “Text is meant to be a conversation,” says Ben Vershbow, an associate director at the institute, [...]

“What if you could travel to parallel worlds: the same year, the same earth, only different dimensions…?”
That’s the opening line to one of my favorite science fiction shows in the 90s called “Sliders.” The premise of the show was simple: a group of lost travelers traverse through different dimensions where history has played itself [...]

Harper’s Magazine recently redesigned their website and Ben wrote a post that jostled a few ideas i’ve had floating in the back of my head. I posted this as a comment to his post, but I wanted to get it up on my site also:

Harper’s has a new web concept designed by Paul Ford [...]

I absolutely love this picture of Björk:

From the photographer:

Bjork (1991, Woodstock) - I’m often asked if I have a favorite photo and I can say without hesitation that it’s this one right here. All of the elements combined to make it one of my favorite moments as a photographer, and it happened purely by chance. [...]

I found an interesting project that performs real time tests on websites to determine whether they are blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” and I was (somewhat) surprised to find that our very own blog was filtered:

Our ideas are considered subversive by the Chinese government! We must be must be doing something right (edit: see [...]

I love “This American Life” on NPR. I recommend most, so I feel silly highlighting just a few, but I have to start somewhere. Here are a few recent episodes I really liked:
The Golden Apple:
The This American Life [...] document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. [...]

From CNN:

When Knut [...] was born last December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who later died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.
“Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws,” animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which [...]

I recently saw the following video of a technology that models human faces:

This got me thinking about relationship we have to our face. Our face is the most public representation of ourselves to society, yet is it also our most intimate and personal feature and it’s what we think of when we think of ourselves.
What [...]

In college, I rarely locked my room and people knew it and I don’t think i’ve ever had anything stolen. I also know of numerous occasions when people went into my room, got something they needed and returned it when they were done. And it never bothered me.
In the other side of the spectrume: I [...]

The Online Education Database is running a story on the way the Open Source movement changed education, that assumes a causal relationship between the two:
MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, [...]

Another amazing piece by alex.

Last week I went to an exhibit on Robert Moses, the legendary New York city planner, at the Museum of the City of New York. All the while making sure we drove through as much of the city that he helped develop as possible.
While Moses was complicated man, and views on him vary a great [...]

Here is a little back story to this video, by Alex Itin:

We met the other night at the Institute to discuss the upcoming relaunch of the blog. Some of the discussion turned technical (which is to say over, or under, or around my head) so I started shooting things. Later, the evening devolved into food [...]

Yahoo! recently announced a new service called pipes that hopes to bring the ability to “mash-up” to the common folk.
As always, Tim O’Reilly has a very good description:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mash-up, providing a drag and [...]

I’ve always been fond of economics. To me, economics has always felt like a logical extension of computer science. (Elaboration: the science of computers is actually done by mathematicians and computer scientists apply these ideas to become ‘computation experts’ ). Since modern economies are driven by technology, often involving computers, and technologies change the way [...]

Imagine a world without publishers, broadcasters or record labels. Imagine the complex infrastructure, large distribution networks, massive advertising campaigns, and multi-million signing contracts provided by the media incumbents all gone from our society. What would our culture look like? Will the music stop? Will pens dry up?
I would hope not, but I recently read Siva [...]

Yesterday Apple Computer announced an official name change to Apple Inc. Is this a sign that Apple is leaving the computer industry? Nope. It’s a sign that computers have become so ubiquitous that the definition has broadened into, what appeared to be, distinct technologies.
Case in point: Apple’s new cellphone-camera-browser, the iPhone, uses Mac OS X.

College, for me, as it is for many, was a profound experience where I learned, most importantly, how to look and analyze the world in a way that was relentless, but rewarding. As a child I believe I collected lots of information, but reserved judgment on many of them. I was able to hold contradicting [...]

Last week, the London Times reported that the Wikipedia founder, Jimbo Wales, was announcing a new search engine called “Wikiasari.” This search engine would incorporate a new type of social ranking system and would rival Google and Yahoo in potential ad revenue. When the news first got out, the blogosphere went into [...]

There are some interesting changes happening this blog now… I’ve had a few big changes lined up for the mid-term future, but this change will come into effect immediately.
I’ve been an adjunct member of the Institute for the Future of the Book for the past few months now and to be perfectly honest, it has [...]

Carl Sagan has been very important in the development of my views. Even before I knew who he was.
Here is a sample why:
When I was 14 I saw the movie “Contact” and for the first time in my life realized that it was okay to admit I was an atheist.
So it is nice to read [...]

At Future of the Book we recently hacked Wordpress to allow comments to tie to specific paragraphs in the text and I think it turned out pretty well. Other people seem to think so [1][2][3]. In just a few sleepless nights we had fully functional comment system that worked well enough to launch [...]

This is nice…. windy eh?
6. Future of the Book
Ostensibly about exploring the shift from the printed page to the networked screen, Future of the Book stumbles across a variety of new ideas along the way, such as creating a wikibook on gaming. Although occasionally windy, Future of the Books is on the precipice of something [...]

In New York City we are in the the later stages of autumn. The trees are bare and brown leaves litter the streets. It rained last night, so many of the leaves are wet, but most are easily taken by the wind. The breeze is really strong and my cloths easily press against my [...]

I was checking out first webpage ever created, by Tim Berners-Lee, and found an interesting page where he outlined the potential uses of “hypertext nodes”, as he called them. At first I thought it was interesting that he did not consider a consistent navigation between nodes, but then that was easily overshadowed by his accurate [...]

The notion of “software as service” is challenging the concept of software similarly to the way today’s global economy is challenging the idea of what it means to be a company.
As bizarre as it might sound, Japanese brands are often manufactured in the United Sates, while American cars are often manufactured in Mexico. If parts [...]