This demo shows the use of Second Life as a platform for Augmented Reality. With our modified Second Life client, avatars and other Second Life graphicss can be superimposed perspectively correct on a live video stream and in real-time.   more »

Augmented reality combines features of a virtual environment with the real world. Most often, the augmentation is visual, with a user sporting an eyepiece connected to a wearable computer and positioning equipment. By tracking where the user’s head is and what he is seeing, the computer is able to overlay graphics and/or text onto his vision.   more »

Barack Obama has made history. Here are some well considered meditations on the historic events and news coverage of the past week courtesy of Jon Stewart.   more »

Second of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery . Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of Einstein’s gen- eral relativity and the current standard model in quantum physics, the twin pillars of twentieth century physics. Molecular biology is a product of reductionism, as is the Human Genome Project.

But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid- twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our hu- man choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics.

In this book I will demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be re- duced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came na- turally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory ar- rows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to call upon a Creator God.....    more »

First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....   more »

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....   more »

Donald Theall, Marshall McLuhan's first graduate student recently past away. Theall like McLuhan was also a brilliant Joyce scholar and saw much of what we now know as cyberspace prefigured in his works. - rc

The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way that artists, critics, scholars and communicators viewed the role of technological mediation in communication and expression, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan's desire to write a book called "The Road to _Finnegans Wake_." It has not been widely recognized just how important James Joyce's major writings were to McLuhan, or to other major figures (such as Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Lacan) who have written about aspects of communication involving technological mediation, speech, writing, and electronics.

While all of these connections should be explored, the most enthusiastic Joycean of them all, McLuhan, provides the most specific bridge linking the work of Joyce and his modernist contemporaries to the development of electric communication and to the prehistory of cyberspace and virtual reality. McLuhan's scouting of "the Road to _Finnegans Wake_" established him as the first major disseminator of those Joycean insights which have become the unacknowledged basis for our thinking about technoculture, just as the pervasive McLuhanesque vocabulary has become a part, often an unconscious one, of our verbal heritage.  In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: ...
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Nigerian child waits for food (AP photo)

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls "de-peasantization"--the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: "Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a 'consumer' of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally...."   more »

Dr. L. M. Singhvi, an eminent Indian citizen and jurist who served India's cultural, literary, legislative and public life in numerous ways, including as Indian High Commissioner to U.K.; as Chairman of Jnana Pith Pravara Parishad, as Chairman of High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora passed away on 6th October 2007 at the age 76. Here, an Aurovilian remembers his association with Auroville and his service to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother....   more »

China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq...   more »

human/cow embryonic stem cells
Photo courtesy University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Although some have concerns about the crossing of human and ape species, the possible creation of a hybrid Hanuman or other entities previously thought to belong only to myth :

"In April 2005, the National Academies -- chartered by Congress to advise the nation on matters of science -- released a report affirming that scientists should be allowed to create such entities if the experiments were approved by special review boards. The advisers came down against the creation of human-monkey or human-ape embryos, as well as experiments in which a human-like brain might develop in a non-human animal" wp.

The UK has just approved research for the crossing the boarders of human bovine species limits to harvest stem cells:

"The bill would allow scientists to continue injecting human DNA into cows' eggs that have had virtually all their genetic material removed, as well as other hybrid embryo processes for stem cell research. Scientists say the embryos would not be allowed to develop for more than 14 days. "wp

In England apparently there has been a long reasoned debate on the issue, one has to wonder however what is going on with embryo research in emerging nations where the market for experimentation may be seen in only the context of its exchange value. Whatever the case it appears our future bodies will in some way or other cohabit, or draw upon a physical (subtle physical) world shared with other species

What follows is a report from the Washington Post on recent events in England along with some further context of chimeras from the Center on Bioethics and Public Policy. rc...

Inter-species hybrids and chimera are entities created from the mixing of two or more different species. Hybrids are organisms whose genetic make up has been created by mixing the genes of two or more species; typically the gametes of two species are fused to create a single zygote. Chimera are organisms consisting of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells; for example two fertilised eggs or early embryos may be fused together and develop as a single organism....
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A link will take you to Zizek's my space page, there you can meet some of his friends, Nietzsche, Freud, Jameson, Marx (Groucho) . The wild and crazy guy of critical theory does My Space. As a bonus included is also an article on the symbolic and real in cyberspace:

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real?....   more »

As I have stated elsewhere progress is a feature of the consciousness of the observer viewing the world. And George Bush certainly lives in a world of his own.   more »

For better or worse, the information and communication revolution has transformed our economic, cultural, and political world. On an individual scale, many of the traditional social, political, and cultural habits of mind and ways of being that evolved under the regime of the clock are changing rapidly, including the way individuals save, spend, and optimize time. At the organizational level, the pacing of innovation, levels of production, and new product development, are no longer temporally fixed due to the effects of living in a networked society and in the networked economy. 24/7 brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to analyze the differing relationships to time in an accelerated society. Offering much-needed insight and perspective into new issues and problems, this unique volume is the first to offer a wide range of cutting-edge thought on the new economic, cultural, and political world of the networked society. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in this area, such as Barbara Adam, Mike Crang, Thomas Hylland Erikson, and Geert Lovink. ...   more »

Michael Shank: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri cites a sea change in India-Pakistan relations, agreements have been forged requiring a pre-notification of missile testing, and both countries will soon engage in a fourth round of composite dialogues. What else needs to happen to provide a positive tipping point in Indo-Pak relations?

Noam Chomsky: There are a couple of major problems that need to be dealt with. One of them, of course, is Kashmir. The question is, can they figure out a joint solution to the Kashmir conflict? ...   more »

...Listening to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, one might think that the much-discussed power-sharing deal between her and embattled President General Pervez Musharraf is a done deal. And surely, both sides stand to benefit from what would undoubtedly be a marriage of convenience. But with increasing pressure from upcoming elections and difficult compromises demanded by both sides, the hastily arranged union may fail before it is sealed. ...   more »

Ok, the following is what I have come up with after researching the publication history of the Record of Yoga. After getting responses from very credible sources who have been close to the project what follows is a brief summary:

It is unlikely that Sri Aurobindo kept his diary with the idea of publishing it. If he had written it for that purpose, it would have been easier for skeptics to dismiss it. The fact that it lay around for 60 years or so before it was discovered shows that he had no such intention and enhances its credibility. Part of its value lies in the fact that he was not trying to prove anything to anyone except himself.

The Record of Yoga was found in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks among thousands of pages of writings he had not published and in many cases probably would never have published himself. If we went strictly by his stated intentions about the publication of his writings, his complete works might come to about ten volumes. For example, in 1949 he explicitly ruled out the publication of The Future Poetry, The Secret of the Veda and A Defence of Indian Culture without extensive revision which he never had time to do. So his final instructions regarding these books were that they should not be published. There is no such written statement barring the publication of the Record of Yoga. Of course the question simply didn't arise during his lifetime - or the Mother's. The actual decision to start publishing the Record was made after getting the approval of Nolini Kanta Gupta.   more »

A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. With past support from the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation. ...

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...India has had the master-key to this serious problem -- the key named 'spirituality' which looks at expressions of life, religions, art, science, businesses, services - all as forms and names of the single spirit, the Divine. A spiritual person is one who has the fundamental and essential experience of whatever religion he may choose to belong, and has a catholicity of understanding, which comes essentially out of his deeper inner self, of an appreciation of all facets and expressions of life as facets of a single Reality.

Secondly, we have to bring this inner-experience into our thoughts and emotions and actions - it is the best way to lead us beyond religions, into the spirituality of the future. This adherence to a higher truth without the barriers of customs, creeds, ceremonies is the thing that is wanted in India. It may seem an ideal that is beyond the possibility of the common man. But a spiritual symbiosis is the only way of the Future. The principle of symbiosis, exemplified in the 100th monkey, can come of use here: a strong nucleus of spiritual aspirants, a small group of seekers of the adventure of consciousness, seeking and assimilating the New Consciousness is enough to start an atomic reaction which could one day explode as a spiritual-bomb engulfing all humanity in a new Light and Life. ...   more »

Hyderabad, a city of around 6 million, has a long history of communal violence between Muslims and Hindus. On May 18, a bombing at one of India's largest and most historically important mosques, the Mecca Masjid, killed 11 people as Friday prayers were ending.

Hyderabad has recently become a symbol of India's economic boom, an increasingly cosmopolitan center and hub of software and call-center jobs. The city has a thriving Muslim quarter and is renowned as a center of Islamic culture.

Officials said the attacks on Saturday were an attempt by "anti-social elements" to spark a wave of communal violence. There was no immediate assertion of responsibility.   more »

On 11 May 1998, the Buddha's birth anniversary, India tested three nuclear devices. Two days later, two more tests were conducted. After these tests, the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee triumphantly announced that India was now a Nuclear Weapon State. Though India's nuclear capability has been public knowledge for quite some time, the tests took the world by surprise. The decision to test was an immediate, political one; however, India's nuclear weapons program has a long history.   more »

This is why I refer to this type of new media as "meta-media." A meta-media object contains both language and meta-language -- both the original media structure (a film, an architectural space, a sound track) and the software tools that allow the user to generate descriptions of, and to change, this structure.

If you think that meta-media is a conservative phenomenon which 'betrays' the movement of computer culture towards developing its own unique cultural techniques -- Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, simulation, database navigation, virtual worlds, etc. -- you are wrong. Since the 1970s modern computing has been grounded in Alan Kay's concept (influenced by previous groundbreaking work in human computer interface, most importantly Sutherland's 1962 Sketchpad software) of computers as "personal expressive media." After he arrived at Xerox PARC, Kay directed the development of a word processor program, a music composition program, a paint program, and other tools that redefined the computer as a simulation machine for old media. So while the routine use of computers as media simulators was not possible until the 1980s, the paradigmatic shift was already defined by 1970. Gradually, other roles of the modern computer -- a machine for computation, real-time control, and network communication -- became less visible than its role as "simulation engine." (Of course, the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s made the role of network communication quite visible to the public). The computer's ability to simulate other media (which means simulating their interfaces and "data formats" such as written text, image, and sound) is not an afterthought -- it is the essence of a modern post-1970's computer.

(It is possible to state this idea even more radically -- by moving the date even earlier, to the 1930s. When Alan Turing defined the computer as a general-purpose simulation machine that can simulate most other machines that have already been invented, the idea of media simulation was implicitly introduced. But it was only in the 1950s-1970s that the work of Sutherland, Engelhard, Kay, and others made this idea into a reality by allowing the computer to systematically simulate the operations of drawing, drafting, painting, photo manipulation, sound generation and editing, and so on.)   more »

Scientists have induced the age-old phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers for the first time. -- The technique, which uses a virtual-reality-style set up of cameras linked to a head-mounted video display, will help researchers understand how the brain assimilates sensory information to determine the position of its body.

The technique could also improve virtual reality games and remote surgery by creating the illusion that a person is somewhere other than in their own body.

Out-of-body experiences are defined as those where a person who is awake sees their own body from somewhere outside themselves. The experiences have been reported in situations where brain function has been damaged through a stroke, epilepsy or drug abuse. The most common cases occur in traumatic situations such as car accidents or on operating tables. ...   more »