Weighing in at over a tonne and comprising 1,500 valves and kilometres of wiring, it is not what most people would recognise today as a computer. Despite its antiquated appearance, however, this enormous machine—once nicknamed ‘The Baby’—was once the cutting edge of technology. Some of the pioneering engineers behind it gathered in Manchester on Friday to celebrate the birthday of what was the world’s first digital computer. Sixty years ago that day, The Baby completed its first calculation, giving birth to technologies which we are still using. The anniversary drew some of the pioneering engineers involved in its development to the city’s Museum of Science and Industry to see a replica of the machine in action. “The birth of The Baby changed the world forever,” said John Perkins, a Professor at a local university’s faculty of engineering. “We hope the celebrations will raise the profile of computer science and encourage the brightest and best of the next generation.” …   more »

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. This essay aims to develop a conceptual framework ('P2P theory') capable of explaining these new social processes...   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 »

              Michel Foucault
In speaking of the disciple of the body especially, when the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault's: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault's archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves, as William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things". The future is a random other. For example, what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive, paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the discipling machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. rc..

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(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

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...Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks Inc., presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam. By extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.

The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet -- which also goes by the names "Cbeplay" and "Exchanger" -- has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day. ...   more »

...the Global Information Technology Report... assesses 127 economies on scores of factors ranging from the cost of mobile phone calls and available Internet bandwidth to the quality of higher education. Not just a catalog of technical specifications, the report weighs these measures to determine which economies are best positioned to compete in the information-intensive 21st century economy.

The conclusion, as in previous studies, finds Nordic countries grabbing five of the top 10 slots, with Denmark and Sweden placing No.1 and No.2 for the second year running. Credit widespread Internet usage, supportive government policies, and good education. The U.S. came in at No.4, up three positions from last year. Although the U.S. gets top marks in innovation and education, it's pulled down by "red tape and rigidities" that stifle its business environment...   more »

In his book Blessed Unrest, our friend Paul Hawken said that the movement that is rising to stop global warming and many other planetary inequities will be the largest our planet has ever seen. We want to give you the tools to ensure he’s right. Only three years ago, global warming was off the radar screen for many Americans. Today, it is in the national spotlight and a diverse network of groups is rising to the challenge of stopping it. Hundreds of colleges and universities are working to become carbon neutral, reducing emissions from campuses to zero. Community organizers in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere are taking on polluters and fighting for environmental justice. In Appalachia, rural communities are banding together to fight mountaintop removal, a heartbreaking new method for mining coal from that region. People of faith are organizing their churches, synagogues, and mosques, declaring global warming as the moral crisis of our time. Traditional businesses are greening up, while entrepreneurs are building a clean-energy alternative economy that has the potential to create thousands of new jobs. And this is just the beginning.

In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years, we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in Washington DC and around the country have finally created an opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the time to start moving forward, fast. ...   more »

SAN FRANCISCO — A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. -- Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children.

But the saleswoman’s tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer researcher and founder of the nonprofit effort.He demanded that Intel stop what he saw as efforts to undermine the group’s sales, which meant ceasing to sell the rival computer. Intel chose instead to withdraw its support from One Laptop this week.

The project has been a lightning rod for controversy largely because the world’s most powerful software and chip making companies — Microsoft and Intel — had long resisted the project, for fear, according to many industry executives, that it would compete in markets they hoped to develop. ...   more »

Here's an interesting article re the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project. I disagree with the article's conclusion (it omits the vast online support to be provided to olpc students), but I think it deserves further discussion here on SCIY. What do you think?

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At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier. ...   more »

This recent report, from the session on 'Tipping Points' at the important Dec.07 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, illustrates the complexity of current technical discussions about the validity of the increasingly disruptive climate change scenarios being projected by various Climate Change computer models. The bottom line is that our models may be seriously underestimating the rapidly of the coming changes, as indicated in the previously posted article re the melting of arctic sea ice. ~rj

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...In Hansen's talk, he did try to clarify what he meant by a tipping point. His notion of this has less to do with what mathematicians understand as "bifurcations," and more to do with a kind of inertia in the climate system. He means things like having passed a threshold of CO2 which, given warming in the pipeline and the lifetime of CO2, commits a certain discrete event — e.g. loss of perennial sea ice or the Amazon rainforest– to occurring even if we were to later reduce emissions to zero. He tried to distinguish between reversible and irreversible tipping points...

...where things get interesting is where you try to explain a magnitude of signal this big in terms of basic physics. This is important because there is a perception that GCM's vastly underestimate the amplitude of the response to total solar luminosity, leading to a perception that there is some "missing physics" (whether it be exotic amplification of a stratospheric response, or something like clouds and cosmic rays)...

But — the take-home point is that at this point the study of solar cycle response very strongly supports the notion that there is no need to invoke any mysterious or exotic missing physics (like cosmic ray modulation of clouds) in order to represent the response of climate to solar variability. If some models underestimate the response, this is likely to have more to do with errors in the vertical mixing of heat than any missing fundamental physics. ...   more »

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. -- Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times. -- Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. -- "So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative." ...   more »

...Google, however, has been very reluctant to use all this data in its advertising business. One reason is that it has other information that solves its main problem: picking the right ads to show on each page. It uses what people are searching for on its search site and the content of other pages on which ads appear (including, of course, the content of messages displayed in Gmail).

But as Google gets bigger it is tiptoeing into using more data for targeting. It tries to determine the location of users in order to show ads of local businesses. It also gets some personal information about users from partner sites on which it displays ads — like MySpace — to help it choose ads.

And Google has now started dipping its little toe into the pool that Madison Avenue calls behavioral targeting. That approach is based on the idea that the best way to pick an ad to show you now is to look at your online activity from a few hours or days ago. The classic example is showing car dealer ads to someone who searched for minivans yesterday. ...   more »

...What makes WiMAX so special? Think of it as WiFi’s big brother. But where a wireless network in a home, hotel lobby, airport lounge or coffee shop can provide reliable wireless connections at speeds of one or two megabits per second over distances of a few hundred feet, WiMAX is good for at least 10 megabits per second over five miles or more. Better still, in its latest guise, WiMAX can “hand off” connections from one radio tower to the next as users roam around—just like a cellular network.

WiMAX can thus fill the gaps in internet coverage, especially in rural areas and developing countries, where laying cables or telephone lines is too expensive. WiMAX can also provide internet access to mobile users from nearly anywhere. That opens up a whole new market for mobile carriers as well as for makers of internet-access equipment and suppliers of web services.

But WiMAX is not just for people on the move or in remote places. It can also provide internet connectivity to all sorts of devices. Intel wants to put its cheap WiMAX chips in traffic lights, surveillance cameras, television sets and medical equipment. Expect to see them also in digital cameras, iPods and dozens of other portable gizmos. ...   more »

I think this may be an important development. My intuition tells me that Lisi is really on to something here, that we'll be hearing lots more about this, and if his predictions are verified when Large Hadron Collider comes online next year, physics will never be the same. ~ rj

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An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. - Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt)...

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. ...   more »

"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...   more »

#1.Steve Jobs
Chairman and CEO, Apple

During the first two decades of his remarkable 30-year career, the Apple Inc. founder twice altered the direction of the computer industry. In 1977 the Apple II kicked off the PC era, and the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since. Along the way Jobs conceived of "desktop publishing," gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks. As a side gig he bankrolled Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Since returning to Apple in 1997, he has changed the dynamics of consumer electronics with the iPod, and persuaded the music industry, the television networks, and Hollywood to distribute their wares with the iTunes Music Store. With his hugely successful Apple Stores, he gave the big-box boys a lesson in high-margin, high-touch retailing. And this year, at the height of his creative and promotional powers, Jobs orchestrated Apple's entry into the cellular telephone business with the iPhone. ...   more »

Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ...   more »