I have to say, as a rabid Google fanboy, that I was rather disappointed with the Glass demo today at #io12 . First of all, we only saw pictures. Sorry, but in the age of ubiquitous smart phones, I’m not all that impressed when a small device can take a picture. Hands-free doesn’t quite wow me as much as they think it should. Hands free is certainly not worth $1500. Second, am I supposed to believe that it will ever be possible to have a flawless high-bandwidth Wifi connection from a mile in the air? Whatever tech they were using to pull it off, it’s tech that I’ll never have access to as a consumer, and that completely took the wind out of my sails. I don’t want to see how billionaires at play will use the hardware, I want to know how it will change my life. If you want to impress me, +Project Glass, you need to show me the interface and the overlay. This is an augmented reality device, yet apparently your pitch involves demonstrating just how little it will actually augment your reality. “Glass- the tech so advanced it doesn’t do anything at all!” Sorry, +Google, but I want your products to make me into a cyborg. Getting the tech out of the way defeats that purpose. The pictures-and-nothing-else demo for Glass wasn’t just counter-intuitive, it runs contrary to the very nature of the device they’ve designed. This makes me worries that Glass is so far ahead of its time that Google doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. My big worry is that if Google fails with this device, it will set the augmented reality movement back a decade by scaring off investors in similar tech. That would make me very sad. This is tech that […]

This five minute look into the mind of a creative biology student is a must watch for any science educator. It’s absolutely wonderful, I can’t wait to show it to my class. via Michelle Merritt http://vimeo.com/21119709

I’m currently working in the same building as some of the most brilliant mathematicians of our generation. Earlier today, John Nash walked by my classroom and poked his head in the window. I tried really hard not to squeal. Fine Hall changed location in the 60’s, so unfortunately this isn’t the same building that Church, Turing, Godel, and mathematicians at Princeton in the early 20th century used. Still, the Institute for Advanced Study is right down the road, just a few blocks from Einstein’s old home. You can read more about the Golden Age of Fine Hall here: http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pmcxrota.htm

What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Gang-Related Crime “All people are like this,” Brantingham says. “You have focal points around your house, or your community center. Honeybees have their hive. Hyenas have their den. And lion prides have their den. Organisms all tend to have an anchor point for their activities, and gangs are no different.” “A mathematical equation obviously can’t take into account the level of detail sociologists can collect on the ground, interviewing gang and community members, documenting graffiti and crime locations. But this theoretical model turned out to predict with pretty remarkable accuracy actual gang violence in Los Angeles. This model suggests most violence would occur not deep into gang territory, but on the contentious borders between gangs. The researchers overlaid actual crime data on top of their model – covering 563 violent crimes, between 1999 and 2002, involving these 13 gangs – and that’s exactly what they saw. “Violent crime in this part of Los Angeles clustered along the theoretical boundaries between gangs produced by the same math equation that tells us how rival honeybees divvy up space. As a practical matter, this suggests police officers might want to focus their resources on these seams between gang territories.” More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/what-honeybees-can-teach-us-about-gang-related-crime/2377/ via +David Basanta

“To be sure, Wikipedia’s Boko Haram entry is clearer. But the BBN system captures everything that appears on news sites—not just on topics people chose to write Wikipedia pages about—and constantly and automatically adds information, says Sean Colbath, a senior scientist at BBN Technologies who helped develop the technology. “I could go and read 200 articles to learn about Bashar Al-Assad (the Syrian dictator). But I’d like to have a machine tell me about it,” says Colbath. (The system, by the way, picks up the fact that the brutal Al-Assad is also a licensed ophthalmologist.) “It starts by detecting an “entity”—a name or an organization, such as Boko Haram, accounting for a variety of spellings. Then it identifies other entities (events and people) that are connected to it, along with statements made by and about the subject. “It’s automatically extracting relationships between entities,” Colbath says. “Here the machine has learned, by being given examples, how to put these relationships together and fill in those slots for you.” John Verdon originally shared this post: An Online Encyclopedia that Writes Itself – Technology Review Machine reading effort builds dossiers on people and organizations from translated news sources.

#atemporality via +Jeff Baker Jim Carver originally shared this post: Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals the true shape of the Roman world and provides a unique resource for our understanding of premodern history. ORBIS Spanning one-ninth of the earth’s circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exch…

“About 2.5 million years ago, humans first used tools to make other tools then to make tools assembled from different parts to make a unit with particular qualities, such as wooden spears with stone spearheads (ca. 200,000-300,000 years ago.) The bow and arrow and other complementary tool sets made it possible for prehistoric humans to greatly increase the flexibility of their reactions. “There are many basic complementary tool sets: needle and thread, fishing rod and line, hammer and chisel. The bow and arrow are a particularly complex example. The reconstruction of the technique shows that no less than ten different tools are needed to manufacture a simple bow and arrows with foreshafts. It takes 22 raw materials and three semi-finished goods (binding materials, multi-component glue) and five production phases to make a bow, and further steps to make the arrows to go with it. The study was able to show a high level of complexity in the use of tools at an early stage in the history of homo sapiens.” Full article: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CAJ From the abstract: “We show that, when isolated, neither the production of a simple bow, nor that of a stone-tipped arrow, can be reasonably interpreted to indicate tool behaviour that is cognitively more complex than the composite artefacts produced by Neanderthals or archaic modern Homo. On the other hand, as soon as a bow-and-arrow set is used as an effective group of tools, a novel cognitive development is expressed in technological symbiosis, i.e. the ability to conceptualize a set of separate, yet inter-dependent tools. Such complementary tool sets are able to unleash new properties of a tool, inconceivable without the active, simultaneous manipulation of another tool. Consequently, flexibility regarding decision-making and taking action is amplified.” +Adam See Kyle Crider originally shared this post: Complex thinking behind the […]

Celeste Mason originally shared this post: Just too nifty

Human Nature and Technology Center for Talented Youth Princeton, NJ Today starts a three week intensive summer course I’ll be teaching for the Center for Talented Youth at the Princeton site. I’ll be teaching in Fine Hall, home of the Princeton mathematics department. I’m very excited! The course will be taught to 15 gifted high school students, and it will be intense: seven hours a day, five days a week, for the next three weeks straight. This gives us the time to give a comprehensive treatment of the philosophy of technology, starting with Plato and Aristotle and working our way through figures as diverse as Marx, Heidegger, and Turing before reaching contemporary thinkers like Shirky, Latour, and Sterling. The students will be busy the whole time with reading and writing assignments, debates and research projects, and a whole host of other activities. Its a whirlwind ride; I’ve been teaching the course for the last seven years, and it gets better every year. Although the student’s won’t be on line directly, the class will have some online presence. You can see the tentative syllabus here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RyJF_a3bdsRD5myaso9Eo47r9byaT_xpz_RHdAhswFI/edit You can follow us on Twitter @htecb: https://twitter.com/#!/htecb Our first research project, starting tomorrow afternoon, will be a collaborative Prezi on the top technology stories from the last year. You can see the Prezi skeleton here, and it will come alive tomorrow: http://prezi.com/y3vpyrtne590/technology-in-2012/ This list was put together on G+ a week ago from this thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/8cDYQ5DBbCt If you have any questions or are interested in further updates on the progress of the course, just let me know! #cty #human #humannature #technology #htec #htecb #education #princeton #adventuretime

“Working for Internet” is about the most compressed statement for the #attentioneconomy that I can think of. Hint: check my profile. The recent story of the bus lady who raised half a million dollars after her harassment video on YouTube is in some sense another success story of Internet employment, though getting yelled at by kids isn’t exactly a reliable vocation. +Matt Uebel recently posted an article discussing Planetary Resource’s launch of a Kickstarter campaign to fund their multibillion dollar asteroid mining mission. I left the following comment in his thread, which somehow seems appropriate here: “Billionaires are literally asking the internet for money. If there is any doubt that the internet is the most powerful human organization on the planet, this should lay it to rest.”? https://plus.google.com/u/0/105329245585862825504/posts/HCjEwZxLMS7 Michael Chui originally shared this post: I work for The Internet now I have an interesting problem: How do I shoehorn “hired by The Internet for a full year to work on Free Software” into my resume? Yes, the git-annex Kickstarter went well. 🙂 I had asked for enough to…

Koen De Paus originally shared this post: Geoffrey West on cities as organisms Rajini’s recent post about the transportation network of the leaf reminded me of this mindblowing talk from Geoffrey West that draws parallels between organisms, cities and corporations. Truly stunning connections that are bound to spark a massive electrical storm in your grey matter… Seriously, this one is worth watching twice! If you have the time you might even want to check out his 2 hour long talk; http://fora.tv/2011/07/25/Why_Cities_Grow_Corporations_Die_and_Life_Gets_Faster – This is one of those talks that really changed my view of the world when I first stumbled across it. +Rajini Rao‘s post on beauty and utility in a Leaf; https://plus.google.com/114601143134471609087/posts/ZNr6X4ChjTh #ScienceSunday | +ScienceSunday

In my recent #attentioneconomy primer, I included a long selection from +Bruce Sterling‘s novel The Caraytids, which describes a community called the Acquis that organizes entirely by monitoring attention through the use of an immersive augmented reality headset called the “sensorweb”. The whole novel is wonderful, but the discussion of attention camps is particularly insightful. Despite the excitement about these glasses I’ve seen and heard very little to suggest that people understand how they will ultimately be used. To that end, I’m quoting an extended but important passage below. ________ When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they’d been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. The women did this because of the architecture of participation. They worked like furies. As the camp women scoured the hills, their spex on their kerchiefed heads, their tools in their newly blistered hands, the spex recorded whatever they saw, and exactly how they went about their work. Their labor was direct and simple: basically, they were gardening. Middle-aged women had always tended to excel at gardening. The sensorweb identified and labeled every plant the women saw through their spex. So, day by day, and weed by weed, these women were learning botany. The system coaxed them, flashing imagery on the insides of their spex. Anyone who wore camp spex and paid close attention would become an expert. The world before their eyeballs brimmed over with helpful tags and hot spots and footnotes. As the women labored, glory mounted over their heads. The camp users who learned fastest and worked hardest achieved the most glory. “Glory” was the primary Acquis virtue. Glory never seemed like a compelling reason to work hard-not when you […]