The conversation thing

Just seen on Euronews a documentary on Second Life and its leagal issues. Apparently, there are some lawsuits regarding the ownership of land and property in Second Life.

In May 2006, Marc Bragg has filed suit against Linden Lab for “a virtual land deal gone sour.” According to the press-release issued by Bragg, “The suit seeks financial damages in the thousands, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract and for violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law. This suit is unique because the land doesn’t actually exist.” Technically, the land does exist–both as data, and as a user experience–but not as terra firma and he argues that when you mention the term “own” by no means can it be made to signify “licenced” or “rent”.

Property is an interesting concept if we relate it to virtuality. ownership is by no means related to physicality, that’s something we all agree (copyright on an idea is one very good example) and exchange is what gives value to the owned property.

I’ve tried Second Life just today and it seems addictive, but honestly, I would not spend a dollar on things that are a simulacrum of reality. I would most definitely spend money on new inventions, objects, be they as weird as they might be… It’s a brilliant idea for the Linden Lab, I cannot argue, but my take on this is a no.

And then again, in love and science, never say never

The succes of Second life (haven’t tried it yet - Ruxi, you should be ashamed of yourself) has taken industry leaders into creating avatars that can access all virtual worlds and use universal tools. Yesterday and today at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo the top of this industry discuss the future of media and communication/

The challenge IBM and Linden Lab has put themselves to is to how to make avatars transcende from one world to another. Am I talking kantian phylosophy already ?

While I think virtual worlds are one very powerfull trend right now, I, personally, am not that interested. I mean, I would be very interested if I started to play a little, buuut knowing that I would give up my personal life just to play the virtual one, I have to say pass from the beginning.

I have experienced this while playing sims ™ about 6 or 7 years ago when I realized that my own character behaves exactly like me: always tired, needing to sleep, over stressed, with little time to do anything for himself …. so I said … why take (more…)

Apparently Asia followes up Europe so that, for the moment, governments and companies can register interest in specific domain names, such as www.younameit.asia while the general public will get a chance to snap up their own .asia domain when the landrush starts in February 2008.

Can’t wait to get my www.europe.asia domain.

or

www.europe-better-than.asia

… and sometimes you might even get a Nobel prize for it.

Fathers of mp3 industry, France’s Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg win the Nobel prize in physics for independently discovering a physical effect in 1988 which has led to hard disks being as we know them today. Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks, sensitivity that lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”

Further on, cnn.com quotes Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, who said the prize honored a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application:

“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”

I’ve learned about this effect in university. Probably different storage systems will appear and other incredible ways of reading data will be developed, but indeed Fert and Gruenberg’s discovery actually made a point in the last 20 year computer industry.

Remember the first 5MB hard-disk?

Now that’s evolution….

Speaking of which, where do you think we’re heading in this quest for “you can never be too thin” Apple approach, the actual trend for everything in electronics and computer business?

Take a look at this Swiss tool for keeping track of user comments on different collaborative tools such as blogs, flickr, digg etc. -> www.cocomment.com

“coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you’re following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

With the browser extension, comments are automatically collected, no need to remember where you commented, coComment does it for you. “

I’ve tried it out and really is an usefull tool. I’ll definitely use it for my comments .
For tracking back on blogs and social sites this tool works wonderfully. Investigating now on how to use it on other not so mainstream communities. I’ll come back with details if finding out more.

I’ve just read the iht.com article on Muriel Cooper and have discovered a great mind. Never knew where the MIT logo came from and that it was her idea.

She was one of the visionaries that forseen design as interactive and driven by simplicity. In the 60s when tehnology was only in its infancy, people tended to see it as a big monster capable of changing social realities but unflexible.

Cooper has reinforced the idea that on-screen design can be better than just linecodes …. Almost 40 years after we’ve come to Microsoft surface and Apple’s iPhone. Muriel Cooper sure was right!

Royal Academy of Arts presents its Zoo Art Fair…. Interesting name…

Zoo Art fair says they target new talents, so maybe new talents are like wild animals. Now that lives me with two thoughts: either new talents need to be caged in order to be properly seen or they are on the verge of extinction so that they need to be preserved in a zoo.

Rhizome curates an online exhibition of projects that reffer to Google way of life :).

“The selection of projects in Google Art, or How to Hack Google illuminate and critique the influence of this expanding online institution. The projects include ad hacks that attempt to foil Google’s seemingly unstoppable business machinery, playful re-interpretations of search results and alterations of its geographical worldview. Together, they elevate and critique Google’s logic, while recognizing its own deepening relationship with our culture, behavior and lives.”

Curated by Ana Otero for Rhizome.

I liked the simplicity (Maeda, again) of the concept for the GoogleHouses project. It is a website that searches houses images on google by different keywords (you can build interior image collections - bedrooms, bathrooms etc) and exhibits them in a 3D model of walls and interiors.

heheeee… now that’s an example for collaborative society. Japanese state employees working for the greater good of humanity, namely uploading information on the wikipedia. Information that is relevant and vital … for the Gundam animated series

The entire BBC news goes here

Such a nice robot, reminds me of when I was working
on a project of artificial intelligence… pattern recognition (first project in university) and I thought that determining an object by its contour was such a simple thing …. yeeaaah right! discovered only a few hours later that humans are quite marvelous beings … and the most simple things we do, take such vast computation in computer realm ..

I remember before actually starting to work on this assignment (its purpose was to learn the neural network the alphabet and then test the neural network what it has actually learned.. kinda like how we were taught the alphabet in the first grade, remember? ) Anyways, my imagination started to go places and I thought what is the big deal about recognizing letters … such simple shapes … we can always recognize cars for instance … and concepts come from bringing the learned shapes seen the most to conscience, or at least that was what I was thinking….

Well, I was sooo good in theory (I might have been a very good psychologist) but when finding ways to implement it …. the tough part came. And that’s when I realized that for an artificial being just to come to the concept of a car is not a simple matter of seeing many car shapes, you have to have the concept of velocity, of objects that can move, but are artificial, not nature based … and this simple thing such as what is natural and what is made by humans is sooooo hard to even consider not to mention to encode.

When I read the critics about this robot at first I joined the amusement “Even if this cyclist goes at the speed of a snail under sedatives, it is quite amazing to watch it ….”

Guys… just the fact that it can control its moves through a rough path, it’s mooore than enough… not to mention it is soooo cute! Way to go, MuRata!