Photo by Kris Krug

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and the co-founder and co-organizer of Cyborg Camp. You can find her on Twitter here.

Klint Finley: Please tell us what you mean by “cyborg anthropology” and explain what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Amber Case: Cyborg anthropology is the study of human and non-human interaction, especially tools and networks that are formed by networks of human and non human objects.

My work relates to tracing the history of tool use and how it has affected culture over time.

For instance, one can look at a hammer and notice that over the last 300 years the design and function of the hammer has not changed very much.

The shape and form and function are still similar but when one looks at the first computers, which were large machines running on vacuum tubes, and computers now — one sees that the computer’s overall look and function and shape and size has drastically changed.

So then one must look at the idea of the hammer or knife. An animal must evolve a better tooth, or sharp edge in which to capture and kill prey. If a tooth breaks, or is not sharp enough, or the animal is not fast enough, that animal dies and cannot reproduce.

But the human has externalized the evolution by making a tool outside of their mouths. The knife is an extension of the tooth that can be thrown. The speed and excellence of the knife depends on the worker or the person who has power enough to have a worker who can create that tool.

Once we externalized objects and processes, we externalized evolution.

But the computer is different. Tool use has been physical for most of human evolution. Now we see computers as an interface not to the physical self, but to the mental self.

The mental self is an internal space, which is unseen, and a lot of what we see on a computer is unseen unless we look at it through an interface or portal.

So what I do in cyborg anthropology is consider how people upload their bodies into hyperspace, and how humanness is produced through machines and machines through humanness.

I also consider online presence, cell phones and the technosocial self.

Read the rest of this entry »

Human traitors in Oregon are planning the construction of fearsome robot cockroaches physically superior to mankind.

“Cockroaches are incredible,” says John Schmitt, a prof at Oregon State uni. “They can run fast, turn on a dime, move easily over rough terrain, and react to perturbations faster than a nerve impulse can travel.”

Schmitt and his colleagues plan to build cockroach-like but much larger machines to be employed in “difficult jobs, such as military operations, law enforcement or space exploration”.

The spacegoing robowarrior roaches would have huge advantages over today’s vaguely humanoid or quadruped walker robots, according to Schmitt.

The Register: Oregon profs plan giant robotic space cockroach warriors

(via Steven Walling)

The hacker/performance art/activist organization Electronic Disturbance Theater has invented a new device, the Transborder Immigrant Tool:

We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway—things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.

Some background:

In the 80s I was a member of something called the Critical Art Ensemble. We wrote a series of books published in the 90s that speculated on what the future, and computers especially, might bring. Our core speculations were that we would see the emergence of three different arcs of capitalism in the 90s: digital capitalism, genetic capitalism or clone capitalism, and particle capitalism or nano-driven technology. We decided we would speculate not only on the artistic aspect of these emerging capitalisms but also on how we could intervene as artist-activists into each of these areas. We developed the idea of electronic civil disobedience as a way to mediate the emergence of digital capitalism. Some Critical Art Ensemble members have even been arrested for their work. One in particular, Steve Kurtz, was brought before a grand jury in 2004. Homeland Security considered his use of nonpathogenic bacteria in certain museum installations a bioterrorist threat.

Vice: Transborder Immigrant Tool Helps Mexicans Cross Over Safely

(Thanks Josh Ellis)

MIT boffins have devised a method of fitting a chip on the end of the optical nerve which can be used to input electronic images directly into the brain without any need for an eyeball. The technique could offer blind people a degree of vision using head-mounted camera/sensor equipment, in the style of Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. [...]

For now, however, the system has only been tried out in Yucatan minipigs. Three of the diminutive Mexican porkers have had the Star Trek/Gibsonesque implants for seven months, but as yet it’s difficult to tell just how well they work – as the pigs aren’t talking. The MIT boffins have fitted them with instrumented-up contact lenses to try to get an idea of what effects the implants have.

The Register: Geordi LaForge video-to-brain rig built at MIT

(via Grinding)

Pittsburgh police on Thursday used an audio cannon manufactured by American Technology Corporation (ATCO), a San Diego-based company, to disperse protesters outside the G-20 Summit — the first time its LRAD series device has been used on civilians in the U.S.

An ATC sales representative confirms to DailyFinance that Pittsburgh police used ATC’s Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). “Yes, we sold one LRAD unit to a government agency — I don’t know which one — which was used in Pittsburgh,” the representative said. American Technology Corp.’s stock was trading up over 15 percent in heavy activity late Friday.

Daily Finance: Louder than bombs: LRAD ’sonic cannon’ debuts in U.S. at G20 protests

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

Fast Company: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

The article mentions some useful sounding sites:

Peer2Peer University – online community of open study groups for short university-level courses

Academic Earth – The Hulu of online lectures

Western Governors University – actual accredited online university I hadn’t heard of. No grades, and completing coursework is optional.

My contribution to the “edupunk” movement is Personal University, which just launched its first complete program offerings in Computer Science.

From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies.

One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks. The software’s main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn’t do. That means an analyst who is following a tip about a planned terror attack, for example, can more quickly and easily unearth connections among suspects, money transfers, phone calls and previous attacks around the globe.

Wall Street Journal: How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade

(via Alex Burns)

ecky did lots of research into finding a handheld blender that wasn’t crap. She eventually found an article in a consumer magazine that said that there are no handheld blenders that aren’t crap and to just buy the cheapest one available, expect it to crap out, and when it does, buy another one or use the warranty.

As absurd as that situation is, that’s the situation.

She bought a NZ$14 (about US$9.50) handheld blender at the Warehouse (the Warehouse is a New Zealand version of WalMart). Warehouse mostly sells garbage from China, and if you want a cheap appliance that you can count on to break down, or not work properly in the first place, Warehouse is the place to go in New Zealand.

She used that handheld blender for nearly a year and then it crapped out, as expected. She went back to Warehouse with the receipt and got another handheld blender (the same as the last one) for free. As crappy as that stuff is, Warehouse backs it for a year.

I wonder how many products have become commodified to the point where a quality version no longer exists at any price?

Cryptogon: The Crapification of Everything is Just Beginning

Alternatives: a) Buy a high quality used product from a thrift store, built 20 years ago and still going strong. Fix it if it breaks. B) Build one yourself.

US researchers have created ‘bacterial computers’ with the potential to solve complicated mathematics problems. The findings of the research demonstrate that computing in living cells is feasible, opening the door to a number of applications. The second-generation bacterial computers illustrate the feasibility of extending the approach to other computationally challenging math problems. [...]

The Hamiltonian Path Problem asks whether there is a route in a network from a beginning node to an ending node, visiting each node exactly once. The student and faculty researchers modified the genetic circuitry of the bacteria to enable them to find a Hamiltonian path in a three-node graph. Bacteria that successfully solved the problem reported their success by fluorescing both red and green, resulting in yellow colonies.

Science Daily: ‘Bacterial Computers’: Genetically Engineered Bacteria Have Potential To Solve Complicated Mathematical Problems

(via OVO)

Richard Stallman explains why the Swedish Pirate Party platform is bad for open source, and what to do about it:

How would the Swedish Pirate Party’s platform affect copylefted free software? After five years, its source code would go into the public domain, and proprietary software developers would be able to include it in their programs. But what about the reverse case?

Proprietary software is restricted by EULAs, not just by copyright, and the users don’t have the source code. Even if copyright permits noncommercial sharing, the EULA may forbid it. In addition, the users, not having the source code, do not control what the program does when they run it. To run such a program is to surrender your freedom and give the developer control over you.

So what would be the effect of terminating this program’s copyright after 5 years? This would not require the developer to release source code, and presumably most will never do so. Users, still denied the source code, would still be unable to use the program in freedom. The program could even have a “time bomb” in it to make it stop working after 5 years, in which case the “public domain” copies would not run at all.

Richard Stallman: How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software

The Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer emulates the computer system used by the Apollo program’s lunar missions. It is available for Windows, Linux, and OSX (and there’s a demo of it running on a Palm Centro but I didn’t see a place to download it).

Virtual AGC and AGS

(via Bram Pitoyo

In relative terms, this recession has been much less hard on Oregon’s high-tech industries than the dot-com and telecom busts were early this decade. And though the state’s technology manufacturing base continues to erode, a new cluster of Web services companies have sprung up and created a vibrant culture around social-networking technology.

Hopes are high they could lead Oregon technology out of this latest downturn, though their economic impact is muted.

Many of these small companies have set up shop in previously rundown buildings downtown or on Portland’s inner east side. They share a passion for social media, which connects people online through a series of tools including wikis, blogs and the instant-messaging service Twitter.

Prominent examples include Jive Software, AboutUs and SplashCast. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of even smaller companies are bootstrapping themselves with just a handful of employees and their laptops, using low-cost open-source software to launch their businesses with a minimum of startup costs.

OregonLive: Oregon’s high-tech better off now than in dot-com bust

The article’s side panel lists a few companies that are “bucking the trend” during the recession:

Ensequence Inc.

Jive Software

TriQuint Semiconductor Inc.

If we wanted to deny Amazon all benefit of the doubt, and to construct the maximum case against them, it would go something like this: it was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding “Safe Search” options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid, yes, all true. If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

Clay Shirkey: The Failure of #amazonfail

(via StephenWalling)

We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company’s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user’s home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).

All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.

The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.

Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.

Monthly listings could be provided by catalog, reducing the on-line storage requirements of the computer. The entire service would be accessed by phone, even if the local reception is via TV cable.

Techdirt: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?

(via Richard Metzger)

It’s certainly exciting to see technology being used in ways that amplify and extend the impact of movement organizing. I think it’s easy, however, to misread the technology as the cause of the movement rather than as simply a tool of it.

Fire, for instance, was a society-changing tool. Its revolutionary potential, however — cooking food and thus making it more digestible, nutritious, and lasting — was only realized through its strategic use.

Some people, awed by the fire, seem to confuse it with the food.

And besides:

In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple — young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and ‘mourning Moldova’ because of Communists victory, which nobody recognized due to the multiple violations before and during the campaign. They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc.

Rootwork: Why there’s no such thing as a Twitter revolution

(via Tara)

Disclosure: Renegade Futurist sells paid link advertisements.

This article explains how paid links are not actually the way well financed interests manipulate Google. They have more insidious ways to manipulate search results.

Paid Links and Sponsored Conversations are minor problems compared to SERP-engineering of this magnitude – however, what can really be done about such tactics? This isn’t just a matter of paid links – it’s the wholesale creation of a large ‘paid network,’ tied in with real world, offline events optimized to manipulate search engine results.

And keep in mind that the example above is just one piece of one small and relatively primitive operation (from ‘way back’ in 2006, and privately funded). This is the merely the point of the tip of a huge, honking iceberg. Reputation Management SERP manipulation will only get more subtle, powerful, and pervasive, as more and more money is put behind the effort and as tactics are honed.

In the face of the power of money, does Google really have a hope of keeping the ‘World’s Information’ free from massive “inaccuracies and inequities”?

And how hard will they really try?

I Want to Believe – in the Internet’s Great Promise, and in Google’s commitment to “Not Be Evil” while “providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information.” I really do. So if there are any White Knights of Truth in the Googleplex, keep up the good fight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light …

But sadly, it’s difficult to reasonably hope that the internet can fare any better against corruption than any other information medium so far has. Print, radio, television … all almost totally co-opted by power and money. The internet, giving citizens the ability to search for information rather than merely have it fed to them, has such potential to break this trend – but only if that very ability to seek and find the truth is not, itself, corrupted.

Full Story: Pass the Mayo

(Thanks Justin)

Shizzow encourages users to accompany each location update with a short message describing their current activity. The added context is super helpful in real life social applications, and it elevates Shizzow above a simpler service like Fire Eagle, which just provides location data, and Brightkite, which is being used more like Twitter with location attached. By contrast, Shizzow puts location at the fore.

Full Story: Wired

The $12 computing system itself defies conventional expectations of what a computer today should be. The soul of the Apple II and a geek microprocessor favorite of the 1970s, the 8-bit 6502 processor is the heart of these computers. It is small enough to be contained within a full-size keyboard and sold for mere dollars. The keyboard also has a slot for game cartridges, and is usually sold with a mouse and two game controllers. Many of these systems are currently on sale as “TV computers” in Bombay, Bangalore and Nicaragua. They are often packaged in boxes emblazoned with unlicensed cartoon art (Mario, Spiderman) and misspelled English (“Lerrn compiters the fun way!”) and are bundled with games that would likely be copyright violations in the United States. And like the early home computers sold in the United States, they plug into a TV screen for display. [...]

It’s an ambitious project and one that requires just a tad of youthful optimism to pull it off. Dodge a pothole in China or India and you are likely to bump into the carcass of yet another ambitious attempt to bring low-cost computing to the developing world. The MIT Media Lab-backed One Laptop Per Child project planned to bring $100 computers to those in need. That project has never been able to achieve that price point, although OLPC cofounder Mary Lou Jepsen said Tuesday here that more than a million of the project’s XO laptops had been shipped to kids in more than 30 countries. Recently, Indian government officials made an announcement of a $10 “computer” that proved to be a dud.

Full Story: Wired

Powerplay’s web site

The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror — all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the brains behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, and colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers (red, blue, green and yellow) helped the camera distinguish the four fingers and recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created.

The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to provide more information about him — his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. “This is a more controversial [feature],” Maes said over the audience’s laughter.

In another frame, Mistry picks up a boarding pass while he’s sitting in a car. He projects the current status of his flight and gate number he’s retrieved from the flight-status page of the airline onto the card.

“If you need to know what time it is, it’s as simple as drawing a watch on your arm,” Maes said, while Mistry used his right finger to draw a circle on his left wrist. The face of a watch popped up on his hand, which the audience liked.

Full Story: Wired

“There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in the developing world, 305 million computers but only 11 million hospital beds,” said Terry Kramer, strategy director at British operator Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. That’s why Vodafone, along with the United Nations and the Rockerfeller Foundation’s mHealth Alliance have banded together to advance the use of mobile phones to better aid those in need of healthcare in the developing world. [...]

Examples of the mHealth projects included:

* Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
* Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
* In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
* In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
* In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
* In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.

Full Story: Read Write Web

As promised, here are some ideas for new business models for professional journalism. This is geared towards established companies rather than start-ups.

I’m ignoring established revenue streams. Not necessarily because I don’t think they can’t work, but because I’m trying to focus on new ideas. I don’t necessarily think the following ideas can successfully support massive newsrooms on their own – but they could certainly bring in additional revenue. Think of this as a proof of concept that there’s room for innovation in news media business models.

Leverage archives and brand

What do the established media companies have that upstart online companies and bloggers don’t? Massive archives of content – decades of material. How can this be leveraged to make more money and fund the newsrooms producing new content?

The other thing established newspapers and magazines have is a recognizable brand. More on that later.

Idea # 1: Provide business information services – compete with LexisNexis

I don’t know exactly how LexisNexis works. I assume they license archives from the New York Times and others. So this is already a revenue stream for the papers who sell content to Nexis.

But what if they fired the middleman and expanded their offerings? Gannet, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, and a few other companies could find ways to offer a lot of value. The Time’s open search API is interesting, and the possible start of “newspapers as platforms.”

They’d have to compete head-on with Google (I assume Nexis already is) to provide premium business with premium access programs and meaningful search systems. Business intelligence companies might be good acquisition targets. The key to success here will be not in just dumping tons of raw data on companies, but finding unique and useful ways to sort it and find value in it. Which is exactly what newspapers are supposed to be doing for the public.

There’s a conflict of interest potential here, but I’m not sure having a few big “business information service” clients is any worse a conflict than having a few big advertisers.

Idea # 2: Offer archival material – maybe personalized

Time has a publicly accessible online archive of all their articles all the way back to their beginnings in 1923, including covers. This seems really smart since they can run ads on all these millions of pages (I don’t know if they make more than way than by selling to Nexus and similar databases, or if offering everything up for free like that prohibits them from also selling to databases). They also have special collections based around particular themes or people, like World War II and Johnn Lennon.

The New Yorker sells a DVD of their complete archives. I don’t know if there’s any sort of topical sorting features on the DVD to help you find stuff based around a theme.

But here’s an idea: Couldn’t Time, The New Yorker, and any other magazine or newspaper with sufficiently deep and archives and quality content sell hard cover commemorative books and/or slipcase editions on topics of special interest to collectors (like WWII, John Lennon, JFK, Marilyn Monroe). Books of photos, stories, covers, etc.

I’m sure a few such thing already exist, but it seems there could be quite a market for such products.

When Time published their archives my friend and Buckminster Fuller historian Trevor Blake went through their archives to read everything they had ever published about Bucky. I don’t know if there would be a huge market for, say, a Harper’s Buckminster Fuller Archive but it gives me another idea: media companies could partner with print on demand services like Lulu to sell special customized archives of material from their archives. Build a simple interface to let people drag and drop text and pictures into a template and charge them a premium for a nice hardbound collection of material. Maybe even let them make their customized books available for sale and cut them in on the profit.

Idea 3: re-invent the online classified

There’s only so much leverage a small local paper or alt-weekly can get out of its archives. But they do still have their brand names. So whatever online offerings they may have will probably draw a lot of attention – the trick is to monetize it.

Papers have been complaining that Craig’s List killed their classifieds, and are therefore killing their papers. I’ve got news for them: Craig’s List is far from perfect. It’s ugly. It’s been years since there’s been any significant improvement (since the addition of RSS feeds I’d say).

There’s plenty of room for local papers to compete with Craig’s List. They just don’t want to have to give the bulk of their classifieds out for free. Why not? Craig’s List changed the game (actually, eBay did even before that), so it’s time for papers to start playing it. Simply Hired and Indeed compete with CL for job listings. OK Cupid competes with them for personals. Cars.com competes with them for auto listings. Get in the game.

Select Alternatives is making some headway here, offering online personal sites for alt. weeklies. The Portland Mercury uses ‘em and I’ve heard very good things.

Hint: there are major opportunities in geolocative services.

Conclusion

In short: papers should be acquiring and partnering with tech companies, and hiring innovative software developers. There are plenty of untapped markets that newspapers are in a unique position to take advantage of if they’re willing to experiment and innovate before it’s too late.

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Rethinking Journalistic Ethics in Relation to Politics
• JellyFish A New All-Inclusive Social Network Online Community for …
• Papers considering charging for content (again) – Lost Remote TV Blog

The New York Times will not go quietly into the dark knight of new media. Amidst constant rumors of the death of traditional news, the much-respected industry stalwart is moving quickly to build a compelling and forward-looking solution that redefines “the newspaper as platform”, as ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick notes.

Today the NYT announced that 2.8 million articles will be exposed to the digital world through the site’s API, allowing anyone to link, annotate, mashup, and crawl the data for meaning. This opportunity to construct data visualizations that abstract patterns & trends from within the articles is perhaps the most interesting element that immediately adds human value to what is otherwise an overwhelming amount of information (2.8 articles).

The recent Twitter Superbowl visualization, as well as other visualization experiments at NYT.com, are indicators of how the company is gathering data and parsing it in meaningful ways. A list of Twitter posts related to the Superbowl is just a long index table. Even reading the Summize Search feed for such a huge event is dizzying. But a geo-located, timeline mashup of tweets & key terms with a map of the US is immediately valuable to anyone trying to get a bead on trends. Their implementation is simple & entertaining, and you can derive substantial meaning at a glance.

Full Story: UR Being Recorded

The next step is offering meaningful business information from this data and competing with LexusNexus.

“A voyage to fabled Timbuktu in a flying car may sound like a magical childhood fantasy. But this week a British adventurer will set off from London on an incredible journey through Europe and Africa in a souped-up sand buggy, travelling by road – and air.

With the help of a parachute and a giant fan-motor, Neil Laughton plans to soar over the Pyrenees near Andorra, before taking to the skies again to hop across the 14-km (nine-mile) Straits of Gibraltar. The ex-SAS officer then aims to fly over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, above stretches of the Sahara desert and, well, wherever else the road runs out. But forget Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – this flying machine is based on proven technology.”

(via BBC News. h/t: The Adventure Blog)

John Robb writes about the potential for transformation of the educational system:

* Lectures. Videos of lecture series, plus associated materials, are available for many courses at some of the best Universities in the world (i.e. see MIT’s open courseware). Online videos are not only better than in-person lectures in many respects, they also allow you to get the best. There is no need to recreate the lecture with tens of thousands of less qualified/exceptional teachers.

*Application. As MIT is finding out, JIT (just-in-time information) in combination with simulated application of the concept to real scenarios is the best method for success. The advent of computer simulated virtual worlds for in the computer gaming industry have proven this combination (JIT info and immediate application) can train kids to adults in complicated and complex tasks in a fraction of the time other methods require.

* Collaboration. The business world is already shifting on online collaboration as a replacement for most in-person work (the economic crisis will only accelerate it). In my personal experience developing exceeding complex products, its possible to conduct the entire process from ideation to delivery online without any face to face contact (at great savings in time to direct expense). Unfortunately, this ability/skill/mindset isn’t central to the educational world, despite the fact that students are currently doing much of this already in their private lives with social software.

Full Story: Global Guerrillas

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that his organization will be cutting half its staff and ending in-house development of Sugar, the Linux-based operating system that ships on its tiny XO Children’s Machine laptops.

Even though the OLPC project has been praised by the mainstream media, the free software elite and humanitarian organizations for its goal to supply low-cost, educational computers to developing countries with little or no technology infrastructure, the project has been beset by a host of problems and delays. The worldwide economic downturn has slowed hardware orders, but the project was largely sidelined by the revolution it helped create — a wave of low-cost, low-powered laptops built to run Windows, like Intel’s similar Classmate PC. Now, even the OLPC project is transitioning to Windows after realizing it’s what customers want. [...]

Sugar will continue to grow, thanks to Sugar Labs, an open community founded by OLPC-er Walter Bender dedicated to building up the OS.

Full Story: Wired