Number station broadcast 10/12

Apr 27

• Manufacturing: The third industrial revolution : “The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital.”
• How To Be A De-Motivational Leader : “With all this talk of trying to motivate the people around you, I’m concerned that all we’ll do is create a bunch of overachievers. Overachieving is over-rated. In order to be fair and balanced, I think we need a good lesson in how to demotivate people. It’ll do their over-sized egos some good. Toughen up the masses. Besides, recent studies show that we’re spending WAY too much time trying to boost everyone’s self-esteem. So let’s step back a bit from the compliment and think more in line with containment.”
• A Girl In Publishing: “Costs Nothing To Produce.” Harumph : “So, of course, because I’m me, I take everything so very personally, I went around tweeting that Chabon essentially thinks my role, that of ebook person, is essentially worthless, that the value he sees in a publisher’s role is all dictated by the physical side of things, the “real” work — the editorial, the print production, the very paper machine that drums up his words for the masses, the boxes that get opened by long-suffering bookstore owners.”
• University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets : “The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.4 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.”
• Harvard Releases Big Data for Books : “Harvard is making public the information on more than 12 million books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more things inside its 73 libraries.”

Number station broadcast 9/12

Apr 06

• New Surveillance System Identifies Your Face By Searching Through 36 Million Images Per Second : Hitachi Kokusai Electric recently demonstrated the development of a surveillance camera system capable of searching through 36 million images per second to match a person’s face taken from a mobile phone or captured by surveillance.”
• All in a day’s work: Design and print your own robot : “MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.”
• The Disobedience Archive Comes to SA+P : “Founded in 2005, and since exhibited around the world, The Disobedience Archive is an atlas of activist approaches developed by artists and filmmakers after the fall of the Soviet bloc that are currently proliferating on a global scale. Using ‘tactical media’ such as low-cost video and free web access, the DIY techniques offer unprecedented access to those who feel they’ve been damaged by mainstream culture.”
• Wall Writers, Documentary About Graffiti Pioneers of the 1960s : “WALL WRITERS uncovers the origins of wall writing in New York City and Philadelphia in the late ‘ 60s and features interviews with writers such as New York’ s TAKI183, the first wall writer to garner mainstream media attention. TAKI, as well as Philadelphia’ s CORNBREAD, were paramount in making graffiti the phenomenon that it is today.”
• It takes 56 hours of wasting time on the web… : “The web encourages inefficiency. It is all about creating opportunities and ignoring problems. Therefore it has hatched more originality in a few weeks than the efficiency-oriented Dialog system has in its lifetime, that is, if Dialog has ever hatched anything novel at all.”

Number station broadcast 8/12

Mar 30

• ThinkerToys : “As a designer and engineer, I asked myself what should I do, I do not have political or economical power enough to make a difference. eWaste and kids not interested in education. What should I do? Ah! there there, eWaste = partly functional gadgets at no cost and kids = maybe fun interactive toys made from those gadgets? With that thought, ThinkerToys started, converting eWaste into educational fun interactive toys. Tinkering was a central part of coming up with new toys, and these toys were made to make the kids think, and yes that’s where the name comes from, Thinking X Tinkering = Thinkering.”
• Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world’s smallest nation : “A few weeks ago, Fox News breathlessly reported that the embattled WikiLeaks operation was looking to start a new life under on the sea. WikiLeaks, the article speculated, might try to escape its legal troubles by putting its servers on Sealand, a World War II anti-aircraft platform seven miles off the English coast in the North Sea, a place that calls itself an independent nation. It sounds perfect for WikiLeaks: a friendly, legally unassailable host with an anything-goes attitude.”
• Are libraries resisting open source? : “My husband and I are librarians. We were talking recently about library training, the library profession, the open source movement, and how open source digital content is being distributed today in public libraries. We were struck by the way that open source thinking has infiltrated many areas—but not yet the profession or institution of librarians.”
• Occupy Tracking : “Major advertisers and corporations have been quietly tracking the online movements of those visiting “Occupy Wall Street” related sites for months. They have have used this data to create detailed portraits of the lives and interests of potential protestors. This data is then sold in unregulated markets and retained indefinitely in databases that may be subject to secret government subpoena. The most shocking thing about this is who is ultimately responsible: the self-proclaimed revolutionaries who run the sites.”
• How Inequality Threatens the Promise of Big Data : “This year, the health team’s research has focused on big data and the world of innovation that it will open up. But while emerging technology will give us much more comprehensive data than we’ve had in the past, it won’t be perfect. Inequality will probably create significant data blind-spots/gaps in the future, because it does in the present and it has in the past.”

Number station broadcast 7/12

Mar 16

• Hands on with Raspberry Pi : “I was extremely fortunate to get access to a Raspberry Pi alpha board for the past couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t already heard about it, the Raspberry Pi project was started to provide a tiny computer for kids to learn to program. …What’s truly revolutionary is the price point – all of this comes for $25. At that price, the potential for a full blown computer in lots of homebrew embedded electronics projects could be transformational and the initial release of board for pre-order sold out in a matter of hours.”
• Data Lockers: The Future of Personal Data? : “One of the themes that is running through SXSW this year for me is how a major shift is taking place where all the data we are creating as consumers will not be owned, controlled and monetised by brands or companies but by us. New business models, tools and apps are putting us in control of our own data and this is very empowering because it means that we can start to shape the world around us, our interests, our passions, our whole lives.”
• The Curator’s Code : “One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery – we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of “link love” – a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new sources through those we already know and trust.”
• ‘Occupy’ as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation : “Last week I discussed the value crisis of contemporary capitalism: the broken feedback loop between the productive publics who create exponentially increasing use value, and those who capture this value through social media – but do not return these income streams to the value “produsers”. In other words, the current so-called “knowledge economy” is a sham and a pipe dream – because abundant goods do not fare well in a market economy. For the sake of the world’s workers, who live in an increasingly precarious situation, is there a way out of this conundrum? Can we restore the broken feedback loop?”
• Bletchley Park tweet saves Alan Turing computing papers : “There is something quite fitting that a single tweet sparked off a campaign to save the work of a man who helped to develop the world’s first modern computer. This, in turn, led to the development of an exhibition devoted to his life and work. Rare mathematical papers written by Alan Turing are now part of a new display at the World War II codebreaking centre Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.”

Number station broadcast 6/12

Mar 09

• Border privacy handbook launched with workshop at UBC law : “The BCCLA is launching at a workshop at UBC Law School. a new handbook that helps people keep their information confidential when crossing the border. The handbook and workshop are intended to help professionals, like lawyers, doctors, social workers and others with sensitive client information, as well as activists who attract government surveillance, to protect their information while crossing the border.”
• Student Learning Can Only be Described, Not Measured : “All high-stakes testing is based on the paradigm that learning can be ‘measured’ by using a device that produces a number. Tests play the role of this measuring device and the resulting numbers are translated into scores. These scores are then compared and contrasted and by selecting arbitrary criteria are used to categorize students, teachers, schools, districts and states. But what if the paradigm is wrong. What if learning cannot be ‘measured’?”
• Portable 3D Scanner For Your Smartphone : “Armada is a simple, conceptual 3D scanner developed by designers Isaac Blankensmith and Kyle DeHovitz who wanted to be able to rapidly capture sources of inspiration in an editable 3D format. The small and portable scanner was built so that anyone can create high-quality 3D models of objects via their smartphone.”
• Map Your Own 3D Space With Metaio Creator Mobile : “Yesterday, Metaio CTO Peter Meier ran a small demo for me that describes how their new Creator Mobile software allows any user to map a 3D space with a coordinate system, so they can then add their own digital, Augmented Reality content to that space. This mobile app will work in conjunction with their desktop solution called simply Metaio Creator… which is where the content is actually associated with the coordinate system, via “drag and drop”.”
• The Shape of Shaping Things to Come : “3D printed objects, or “physibles” are an incredible example of the mundane aspects of future-weird. They are glitchy-as-fuck, but their shapeshifting effect on our cultural space will inhabit the same metaphysics of street graffiti— appreciated by only a few, truly understood by even less.”