The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ [...]

This is really old in internet time, but I just watched it now and it is definitely worth it. David Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and tells basically the same Aristotle to Heidegger story I tell in my own class.

See also: Ontology is Overrated and Information R/Evolution.
Coming up: The Three Pillars of [...]

Ran into this quote from Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without [...]

The Death of Alan Turing

Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale

On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to [...]

Robot Swarms Invade Kentucky
One thing that the robots don’t know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don’t know about everybody else) but not with everybody at once. So [...]

The Soul in the Machine
When I was ushered into the room, the professor motioned me to a chair, his hands playing nervously, his shoulders rising with each breath. “Ask me anything you like,” he said, fixing me with an intent look, before staring at the floor despondently when I began to chuckle. “How many actuators [...]

Excellent article on the Internet up on The Atlantic (thanks, Lally!) that ties the internet into the long history of automated “choreography” characteristic of the industrialized world.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at [...]

From He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) (NYT)

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, [...]

People prefer robots that do small talk
To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners’ requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as “take out the trash” to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond.
The students [...]