The Encyclopedia of Life: “Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth…” —Edward O. Wilson. EOL is community-building online database of animals, plants, and other organisms. Lost to learn, for instance,I know that we saw on our hike yesterday 150 Cervus elaphus.
Draw some lines and feel the ping: BallDroppings is a geometric music maker.
It’s built with the open-source Processing java software, “a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts.” Check this other Processing production: Bicycle Built for 2000 with “over 2000 human voices recorded via the Internet, assembled to sing” a song. (Interview w/ programmer.)
via lissenup.
We done did it, we joined the Facebook phenom to find Fans:
So please Fan our Friends and Friend our Fans and Find our Friends Fans, or whatever it is we socially netted folk do.
Now we’re feeling all SocialWebNet2.0MediaConnected. Maybe a hot shower can wash it off.
“Gary’s Social Media Count” stats, sources and script from Personalize Media, via Gravity Medium.
Aviary’s Myna is a new web tool for editing-layering-mixing audio, all via their website; ie, you don’t need an application, you just need a web browser. Fellow radio producer Brad Linder reviews it at Download Squad:
Aviary launched an online audio editing application called Myna, and its all kinds of awesome. Dont get me wrong, its not exactly Pro Tools or Adobe Audition and it doesnt come with all the audio effects you would expect from those applications. But heres what it does and does well: It lets you create and edit multitrack audio recordings using a Flash-based web interface thats so natural to use you would swear it was a desktop application.
—“Aviary Myna: The best web-based audio editor yet”
Fuqn hilarious— State of the Web 2.009:
A CollegeHumor original: “We Didn’t Start the Flame War”
via Catch My Fame.
TechCrunch reports:
healthBase is a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites… [with] some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really.
The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew?
[So] is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine?
—TechCrunch “NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt “
Our “Oddio Art” automated hyperactive audio-art generator features Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, and Ted Kennedy, with music by Joe Bass and Flash-yness from Eli 5 Stone.
Ad agency Wieden+Kennedy has, what I consider, a rarity: a well-implemented Flash site. Their front-page timeline works very well, and tho it could have been done in AJAX, is probably better in Flash.
via Ben- Comma Q.
Joe Frank has been writing regularly on Facebook. So for those FB-ers among us, check out his oft-updated page.
The DJ deep w/in me can’t help screwin’ w/Grooveshark. I kicked out an hour of song and spoken-weird to stream outta our HV1 Grooveshark playlist:
Another video on the info-age from Prof Wesch and the students of Digital Ethnography (@ KS State U). How do they do it? Their shots are always so simple and sparse, their writing terse, but sequentially, in a series of small insights, they build into something beautiful and moving. “A Vision of Students Today:”
via Robert Paterson.
A friend and talented architect died: Pat Larum, of the firm Comma Q and the website Loggia. Pat was an early web innovator with his daily Momentary Vignettes:
We at HV are now twits, but with a twist. Most tweets are rapid and vapid. We’re experimenting with another approach: slow and substantive: twitticisms. Every morn we add enter another line from R. Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb
Running along the footer of that book’s pages is a continuing line of text. The book’s out-of-print so we’re resurrecting these Bucky bits in 140-character chucks. Follow us @hearvox or read the whole below.
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
–R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)
New Yorker: “Dymaxion Man” | “Weird Science” (slides)
“Starting with the Universe:” Whitney (NYC) | MCA (Chicago)
Whole Earth: “God is a Verb” | “2025, If…” | “Thoughts”
Films: “Thinking Out Loud” | Everything I Know
Bucky Fuller: Institute | Wikiquotes | Dome | Challenge
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
This text is the footer of Bucky Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb:
Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.
Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side.
Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
Half-century of subconsciously developing world revolution is crossing threshold into human consciousness and ultimate popular support.
Today’s students, reared by television, “the third parent,” think world.
They think and demand justice for all humanity with no exceptions.
Theirs will be the most powerful constructive revolution in history. Earth is a very small spaceship. We are all astronauts.
Each human is a whole universe. We have 28,000 pounds of explosives for each human being on earth.
Weaponry has always been accorded priority over livingry. Only two alternatives — Utopia or Oblivion.
All the fundamental problems are world problems. Man knows so much does so little.
Greatest fact of century: We can make life on earth general success for all people.
World’s prime vital problem: How to triple swiftly safely satisfyingly overall performance realizations per pounds kilowatts manhours of world’s comprehensive resources, rendering those resources capable of supporting one hundred per cent of humanity’s increasing population at ever higher standards of living than any human minority single individual has known or dreamed of.
War over population hunger disease would cease to exist if “haves” devoted larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry.
Malthus is wrong. There is enough to go around.
Basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both-ergo-someone-must-die tenets of class warfaring are extinct.
Real wealth — indestructible, without practical limits — is combination of physical energy and human intellect.
Every time we use real wealth it increases. Intellect must increase wealth to eliminate poverty.
Design science, invention revolution could elevate poverty to haveness.
(If you can produce it, you can afford it. If you can’t produce it, you can’t afford it.)
Intelligence should be recognized as a global resource. Brain stores retrieves special case experiences.
Mind discovery generalized patterns apparently governing all special case experiences.
Thinking is the consciously disciplined separation of relevant feedback from irrelevant feedback.
Greatest single revolution in human affairs has been ascendancy of intellect’s intuitive mastery over the physical but all the important critical events realizing that revolution just happens.
Only the impossible happens. Probability unreliable. To each of us environment is everything that isn’t “me.”
New, physically uncompromised metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify world.
It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of man’s antibody, the computer.
Only to their computer’s superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political scientific religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.
Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being simple muscle and reflex machine, a slave automaton.
(By 1975 China may be most impressively modern nation, highly automated.)
Automation can produce wealth beyond all our needs and dreams.
(We’ve always had automation. What’s happening to your lunch?)
Automation has made man obsolete as physical production and control specialist — just in time.
Specialization is only a fancy form of slavery wherein the “expert” is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially culturally preferred, ergo, highly-secure, life-long position.
Nature always does things in simplest most efficient way. All nature is based on triangles.
Nature doesn’t have separate departments of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics.
World society is operating almost exclusively in inaudible nonvisible area of physical universe.
We are living in a world where change is normal.
Because prime evolutionary transformations are invisible, it is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that changes in next 30 years will be far greater than in last 100 years. It is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that.
Artists are now being recognized as extraordinarily important to human society.
Scientist are utterly irresponsible regarding pro-vs.-anti social disposition of “eggs” they lay in the laboratories.
Every child is born a genius: Ninety-nine percent are degeniused by early post-natal circumstances.
Human being has great potentiality, but many wires get disconnected.
Ages 0 to 4 are biggest “school” opportunity. Child is trim tab of the future.
Least favorable environment for study is schoolroom and closely-packed desk prisons.
Real schoolhouse is in the home and outdoors.
Within 10 years anything reasonably think-upable by science fiction will probably have been realized.
Possession is becoming progressively burdensome, wasteful, and therefore obsolete, total man may be going through a total wave of transformation into an entirely new relationship with the universe.
Man freed of special case superstition by intellect has had survival potentials multiplied millionsfold.
Humans can now whisper in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world. (Be sure to entertain all your emotions.)
Intellectual integrity will win tomorrow’s battles with accelerating inexorability.
Political commercial sham false premise institutions will vanish with startling rapidity.
Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success. Success: not a bad thing to have “hanging over your head.”
Experiment is always valuable. You can’t learn less. You can always get nearer to the truth.
(Language can be a block to reality.) Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and Universe is ahead for all of us.
(Man was designed with legs — not roots.) Man can do anything he wants.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
The Silicon Valley correspondent for The Economist looks back on “Six years in the Valley:”
Jaron Lanier, a Valley pioneer, saw behind the Web 2.0 totem of “collective intelligence” an insidious “digital Maoism” that suppressed individuality. Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, observed an unhealthy trend towards “continuous partial attention”, as people spent less time focusing on a single thing or person because they were constantly scanning so many other things—from Facebook to e-mail and their phones—for fear of missing out on some social opportunity.
Perhaps most dangerously, Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked.
Add to that, from the same issue, “Internet companies: The end of the free lunch—again:”
Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. The number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought.
I, for one, hope to never hear the word “monetize” again.
via Tech360.
From CNET, “It was 20 years ago today: The Web:”
Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored “Information Management: A proposal” and set the technology world on fire?
T B-L’s 1989 client/server model for a distributed hypertext system
Infographics galore at Brainz— A Completely Unscientific Yet Accurate Look at Social Sites. “Interested in joining a community based site but not sure which one is right for you?” E.g.:
A curated collection of radio docs, “AudioDocumentary.org is a first-of-its-kind guide to free radio and audio documentary content on the web.” For instance, check this gem they found at Weekend America, a Vitamin A induced Doc Ellis hurled MLB zero-hitter: “FROM THE VAULT: No-Hitter of Acid“.
3MG is an initiative to increase the number of givers to public radio to 3 million by Dec 2012. The project is sponsored by DEI. Their latest effort is a Ning group where list of pubradio stations list their upcoming events, including fundraising dates.
Transom is featuring our “Prostate Diaries” hour. Come join the discusssion: Transom pages- Talk | Show .
Their latest newsletter…
TRANSOM.org
a showcase & workshop for new public radio
http://www.transom.org
February 5, 2008
* NEW SHOW – A Slight Discomfort: The Prostate Diaries *
If this piece were about blood or bones or lungs, it would have aired on NPR. But because it is about the prostate, and includes a talking penis, it presented problems for broadcast. There’s no equal time for body parts.
Barrett Golding of HearingVoices asked us if we at Transom would be interested. Yes. Cancer is cancer and it makes sense to talk about it openly and personally, wherever in the body it occurs. The piece also presents complex challenges of interest to radio producers. It is based on a stage presentation written by the patient himself, Jeff Metcalf, and performed by Paul Kiernan. It was recorded and produced for radio by the estimable Scott Carrier and Larry Massett. They are present on Transom to talk about this work, its style and content.
https://transom.org/?p=1038 More…