get it together

the internet is no longer a concern

Wed, 01 May 2013 20:40:00 -0400

Brain Implants Could Help Alzheimer’s and Others with Severe Memory Damage | MIT Technology Review

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:37:53 -0400

Brain Implants Could Help Alzheimer’s and Others with Severe Memory Damage | MIT Technology Review

Blogger Who Quit The Internet For A Year Had A Horrible Time

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:19:27 -0400

Blogger Who Quit The Internet For A Year Had A Horrible Time:

parislemon:

Yours truly, a year ago writing about Paul Miller’s decision to “quit” the internet for a year:

In my month away from email, I didn’t miss it at all. Not for one second. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil of the modern world. But the internet is different. My guess is that in his year away, Miller will come to realize more and more that the internet is nothing if not one of the greatest achievements in human history.

It’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to live life without it.

I’m sure there will be a killer book deal on the other side though!

A year later, Miller’s own proposed titles for such a book:

No Internet, No Life: The Paul Miller Story

How To Disconnect From Reality In 365 Days

At First I Liked Not Using The Internet But Then It Got Kind Of Sucky

Does this mean that everyone who threatens to quit the internet now has to shut up? Please?

generalelectric: A welder at GE Transportation works on the...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:19:23 -0400

generalelectric:

A welder at GE Transportation works on the production of a locomotive during the final assembly process.

This is funny

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:40 -0400

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review

red bull?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:52:42 -0400

red bull?

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:43:48 -0400

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface | MIT Technology Review:

Have you heard that Google Glass will let you snap photos by winking? Why that’s still going to feel weird.

last one maybe

New Techniques from Google and Ray Kurzweil Are Taking Artificial Intelligence to Another Level | MIT Technology Review

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:40:08 -0400

New Techniques from Google and Ray Kurzweil Are Taking Artificial Intelligence to Another Level | MIT Technology Review:

With massive amounts of computational power, machines can now recognize objects and translate speech in real time. Artificial intelligence is finally getting smart.

Researchers Develop a Cheap Way to Turn Any LCD into an Interactive Display | MIT Technology Review

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:06:24 -0400

Researchers Develop a Cheap Way to Turn Any LCD into an Interactive Display | MIT Technology Review:

Electromagnetic interference can turn a plain LCD into a touch screen on the cheap.

prostheticknowledge: 3D-printed Music Short, sweet, and simple...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:57:07 -0400

prostheticknowledge:

3D-printed Music

Short, sweet, and simple demonstration of the motors of a 3D printer playing music:

NO PRINTER WHERE HARMED DURING THE MAKING OF THIS HACK!
(however this doesn’t mean that yours won’t be, use at own risk)

At art hack day in Stockholm 2013 and using a Lulzbot 3D-printer I tried to visualize
different classical musical pieces.

The project explores the alternative uses of 3D-printers. It’s being used to create
unique art by printing classical pieces of music while at the same time acting as
an instrument and performing the music itself.

The stepper motors controlling the movement can be run at different speeds,
the speed decides the pitch of the sound and makes it possible for the motors to make music.

Link

this is your brain on ebooks

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:53:35 -0400

this is your brain on ebooks:

“This, for me at least, is an uncanny valley that cannot be crossed. Paper and ink cannot be virtualized to my satisfaction, and it’s an article of faith for me (until the science proves me wrong) that the benefits of paper reading cannot be replicated.”

Video

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:05:21 -0400

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512161/a-wireless-brain-computer-interface/

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:52:17 -0400

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512161/a-wireless-brain-computer-interface/

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512061/electronic-sensors-printed-directly-on-the-skin/

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:50:29 -0400

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512061/electronic-sensors-printed-directly-on-the-skin/

"On Facebook, we are perpetually in beta. We don’t reveal a pre-existing self but build ourselves out..."

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:07:33 -0500

“On Facebook, we are perpetually in beta. We don’t reveal a pre-existing self but build ourselves out in code — not just computer code but Baudrillard’s consumerist code, the signs we take for identity’s building blocks. Thus we become streamlined people in Facebook’s projective city, performing ‘free labor’ in exchange for counting stats on our social life …. This is how so-called immaterial laboring works among Facebook’s users as well. Our social activity is captured, its value sorted out later.”

- From Facebook in the Age of Facebook, by Rob Horning at The New Inquiry. (via spauloetc)

Immaterial Labour, by Maurizio Lazzarato [Essay]

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:07:13 -0500

Immaterial Labour, by Maurizio Lazzarato [Essay]:

thenewobjective:

Essential reading from the Italian theorist Maurizio Lazzaratto, long based in France. Must rethink our categories. One reason why decrying outsourcing gets us nowhere. (We still produce as much as ever, for the record. And protectionism only works for young nations incubating a domestic market.) Immaterial labour helps us rethink the transformation of labour markets, and to potentially challenge entrenched ways of doing things.

Some questions opened up, potentially:

If my googling or social networking is being harnessed for profit by their owner, than am I a worker? Granted the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic, but if other jobs, even intellectual jobs, are being automated, and the work we do online or in other immaterial zones adds-value, are we being exploited? Who captures surplus value and why?

Excerpts

“A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

…

The “great transformation” that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as “intellectual,” and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new “mass intellectuality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of “self-valorization” that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between “mental and manual labor,” or between “material labor and immaterial labor,” risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labor process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization.”

….

The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become “productive,” present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel’s, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin’s, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of “fashion” by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its end the regulation and “mystification” of the social process of creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between “material labor and intellectual labor” and demonstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on “aesthetic production” of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad Circle has this same social focus.

This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production.”

shortformblog: discoverynews: Google Maps North Korea Details...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:51:35 -0500

shortformblog:

discoverynews:

Google Maps North Korea

Details of cities and even prison camps in North Korea became more visible on Tuesday when Google updated its Google Maps application to include information citizen cartographers have been providing it about the country through a crowdsourcing development program called Map Maker. Read more…

Good work, Google. The more this info is out there, the more people will pay attention to this issue.

littlebigdetails: Facebook - The ‘Update Status’ field’s help...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:56:10 -0500

littlebigdetails:

Facebook - The ‘Update Status’ field’s help text changes context on Thanksgiving.

via Myles Tan

prostheticknowledge: Time Scanning by Donato Maniello A...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:55:28 -0500

prostheticknowledge:

Time Scanning by Donato Maniello

A collection featuring experimental photography scan-disruptions of trees:

Capturing a moment and expand it up to the point of creating a tear that becomes aesthetic sign.

More Here

sometimes-now: Hilary Lloyd

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:14:30 -0500

sometimes-now:

Hilary Lloyd