I just finished the first session of Howard Rheingold’s online Think-Know course. It seems the participants are an amazing group of people dispersed over several continents. The next weeks we’ll dive into both the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. We’ve been reading… Continue reading
“Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people’s lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. ” Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating… Continue reading
So I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, but there is also that other Makers book – inspired by Doctorow – in which Chris Anderson tells us about a New Industrial Revolution. Here is a video posted on TechCrunch. What we’re seeing here with the third industrial revolution is the combination of… Continue reading
” “Commons-Based Peer Productionâ€. It’s a revolution in how things are made, by whom, and in what quantities. In some ways, the future looks a lot like the past. These blacksmiths are making a local solution to a local problem. And we’re going to be seeing a lot more of… Continue reading
On November 30 and December 1 the conference “MetaMeets 2012. The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality†takes place (‘s-Hertogenbosch,The Netherlands). MetaMeets is a seminar/meeting about virtual worlds, augmented reality and 3D internet, this year’s topic will be The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality. Virtual worlds and… Continue reading
“Project aims to let anyone print a gun in their own home, raising new concerns about the legality of homemade firearms” There really was no reason to believe people would only use this technology to print cute toys and cool components for race bikes. via Diigo http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/26/3d-printing-guns-legal-issues-us-law
“Fab labs are a global network of local labs, enabling invention by providing access to tools for digital fabrication” Bruce Sterling has some comments on Beyond the Beyond http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/09/the-fab-charter-draft/ via Diigo http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/charter/
One of the big inspirations for the MixedRealities blog is the book Race against the machine, written by the MIT-researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. These last few days I’ve read another book about globalization and exponentially growing technologies, Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think, by the engineer… Continue reading
So how can we transcend as seamlessly as possible the restrictions of distances and geography? Affordable telepresence can be achieved using virtual environments, or by an increasing array of cheap or free videoconferencing tools, but there are emerging new possibilities which are very exciting. I’m looking into the possibilities of… Continue reading
“The idea that AI must mimic the thinking process of humans has dropped away. “Creating artificial intelligences that are like humans is, at the end of the day, paving the cow paths,” Mr. Saffo argues. “It’s using the new technology to imitate some old thing.”” via Diigo http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Tech/2012/0916/How-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-our-lives/(page)/3