Dutch police raid 23 apartments and arrest 52 people in one of the largest busts of suspected Nigerian e-mail hucksters. The detainees' identities are not released, but police believe most were, in fact, Nigerian.

"The benefit to you, as an IEI customer, is that a specially tailored Creativity Machine can generate results at typically a tenth of the cost of any other AI paradigm perceived as competitive."

A Negativland-produced indie film coming to the San Francisco Indie festival features nothing but product-placement shots from other movies.

Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 films?removing the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.

Link

(Thanks, Steve!)

Robotics Society of America president David Calkins says:

Only one month left to register for ROBOlympics! You've still got two months left to get ready for the event, but only one month to register to compete. This is the first robot event where all major types of robot competitions will be held at the same time. And of course, you can compete in several events - you're not just limited to one. Also: Tickets go on sale Friday (today)!

Could a robot do "good" and "evil"?

Pixar, the company behind box office hits Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc, is ending its distribution deal with Walt Disney.

If you are a non-terrorist (American Patriot), your participation is required. Please register below.  - John Ashcroft

phonecam art show. jury is out?

The first book ever written totally in the in mobile text messages abbreviated lingo was released in France.

An anti-smoking story targeted at teenagers, "Pa Sage a Taba" -- which means "Not Wise to Smoke" will definitely upset lots of French language purists.

(AFP story)

machine/motion sculptures.

"this installation allows visitors to create creatures (virtual) that evolve within an environment of a glass pool of water."

la county museum of art: "An exhibition making nanoscience visible, tangible, and experiential." via btang phlog.

Interesting intern position available in Berkeley, CA for urban-studies-oriented programmers. This is a cool lab.

Sunil K. Agrawal, a robotics expert at the University of Delaware, is working on small robotic devices that mimic the flight of birds, such as the hummingbird. He chose the hummingbird because it can hover, a key characteristic for the goal of these devices, which is surveillance.

In fact, these robots will carry miniature cameras and fly in groups, while sending their surveillance data wirelessly to a central computer. They will be used in industrial and military applications as well as in rescue operations.

This summary contains more details and looks at the future for these robots. It also includes a photo of one of these "birds."

link via stealth tribe.

Love all the robots on this site for Japanese robot-builders tmsuk (more robots on the Japanese version).

By the same people that make the "HyperRescueRobot" - sort of a walking jaws of life, a terrifying, massive industrial exoskeleton/mecha-type thing, straight out of "Aliens" or your favorite anime. Click the first link on the top nav for some crazy shots of the robot in action (or check out this Babelfish English translation).

Salon has a good overview piece on RSS today, for anyone interested, or who doesn't know what to do with the "XML feed" link on the left.

International artists are being encouraged to e-mail their work to be printed out in a London gallery.

misspellings on ebay.....

aerial photographs taken by the allies during WW2

Motion-sensitive cameras that emit audible warnings are being used to try to keep graffiti vandals away from the railways.

Three talented -- and lucky -- candidates earn dream jobs as Lego master builders in a two-hour, on-the-spot competition. Daniel Terdiman reports from Carlsbad, California.

will accept testimonials for food

There's a new episode of Red vs Blue online -- RvB being the machinima-animated comedy serial made by editing together screen-movies from the game Halo and overlaying a voice-track. This is a particularily good one -- I'm still chuckling.

Link

(via Fark)

IBM and Philips team up to develop radio tagging technology to replace today's barcodes.

Time was that everybody was converting their vinyl into CDs. Now a New York firm will rip an entire CD collection to the MP3 format for a fee. Is this the death of the CD? By Leander Kahney.

A Canadian teenager has agreed to hand over his website to Microsoft in exchange for a goodie bag.

In Cambodia, WiFi-equipped motorcyclists pull up to schools, download all the email, drive to the next village, and dump off copies of locally-destined mail, picking up that community's load and delivering it along to the next town.

It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village's outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. The school's computer system and antenna are powered by solar panels. Newly collected data is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world.

Link

(via WiFiNetNews)

A film-industry coalition drops its court battle against a San Francisco programmer who posted code on the Web that cracks DVD copy-protection technology. The teen who wrote the code was recently acquitted in Norway.

After being warned in a 25-page letter from Microsoft that his website name was a copyright infringement, plucky Mike Rowe agreed rechristen the site. Microsoft sweetened the deal with some incentives.

Wondering what pieces of existing open-source software we hacked together to get the reBlog up and running?

i'm curious to see if this model succeeds, since google isn't selling syndication ads yet and these seem difficult to target

Rock legends Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno will launch a musicians' union to help artists in the digital age.

Really cute and oddly fitting re-edit of Peanuts clips to Outkast's catchy jam. Link (Thanks, Gabe!)

BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:

I already wrote about roll-up screens for televisions or for computers. Now, researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) say that, sooner or later, "powering up your laptop may require that you unroll it first." Engineers at U of T have developed "flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens." FOLED technology could be manufactured using a low-cost, high-efficiency mass production method and products should be available within two to three years. This overview contains more details and references. It also includes a very nice picture of the lead researcher showing such a flexible device.

A Japanese toymaker claims its new device can help users conjure up custom-made dreams by infusing their slumber with fantasy-inspiring music, words and fragrances. By Louise Knapp.

i don't know why people criticize his communication skills

Health officials want to take AOL to court for refusing to warn its members about outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases among gay men who use its service. In its defense, the company cites First Amendment concerns. By Randy Dotinga.

The conservative American Family Association hoped an online poll would sway legislators against gay marriages, but a funny thing happened on the way to the altar. By Daniel Terdiman.

I'm working with O'Reilly Books and am looking for contributors. If you have designed and built a fun, creative, and useful hardware hack or other tech-related project for your home, office, car, or outdoor hobby, email me at mark@well.com. I'd to talk to you.

And they seem to be interested in publishing, making them more similar to Microsoft Research than Google Labs

BoingBoing friend John Brockman says:

"Katinka Matson has just redone her website and put up a catalog of large Iris Giclee prints (up to 3' x 4') for sale. They're beyond spectacular.

As great as they look on the web, the prints take your breath away."

Link

mp3 music - 0 notes - warp records entire catalog for sale in mp3

In my new issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley:

* Software that recognizes faces in the news

* A satellite to unravel the mysteries of dark matter

* High-performance computer chips that don't melt

* The father of Fuzzy Logic

Link

ui vr - 0 notes - head mounted displays

gis nyc - 0 notes - metrobot - map engine and city guide

Some scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (of course) are machining cheese into intricate shapes with the help of pulsed ultraviolet lasers.

"Wisconsin is a big dairy and cheese making state and we were approached by a company that wanted to know if we could use a laser to cut thin slices of cheese at high speed," Xiaochun Li, one of the researchers, told optics.org. "One motivation is the ability to cut cheese into fancy shapes that appeal to kids, such as a dinosaur or letters. The fast food industry is very interested in that idea."

Link

Former Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver, the co-founder with Robert Raushchenberg of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) in 1966, died on Sunday of cancer. E.A.T facillitated collaborations between avant-garde artists and creative scientists, leading to a groundbreaking performance series called Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering. The patron saint of tech-art, Kluver worked with the likes of John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Jean Tinguely (whose self-destroying machines later inspired Survival Research Laboratories).

"In the twentieth century efficient means of spreading technical information have developed and now the emphasis is on the individual's relationship to the environment. This is a change in attitude away from concern for the object--its engineering, operation, and function, and toward aesthetics--human motivation and involvement, pleasure, interest, excitement." --Billy Kluver, 1971

gis - 0 notes - community mapbuilder - allows communities to build and share geographic maps

A new study shows the RIAA's slew of lawsuits seems to be effectively scaring Americans out of their music downloading ways.

web - 0 notes - big list of blog search engines

The EFF Pioneer Awards are upon us again -- time to nominate your cyber-heroes for EFF's annual award for "leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology."

Simply tell us:

1. The name of the nominee,

2. the phone number or email address at which the nominee can be reached, and, most importantly,

3. why you feel the nominee deserves the award.

You may attach supporting documentation as RTF files, Microsoft Word documents
or other common binary or plain text formats.

Link

The Bush in 30 Seconds finalists are posted. This was the competition to come up with a 30-second, Creative Commons-licensed political ad exposing the Bush regime's failings, with the winning spot to be aired in commercial slots bracketing the State of the Union address. Here's my favorite, but the other 14 finalists are also very good.

Link

(via Lessig)

the ruminations on film stereotypes of japanese are interesting, but i was struck by how many of the quotes were pulled from weblogs

a fantastic old video clip showing how far we've come in a decade

Now *that* is a photoblog. Chronologically indexed gallery of interplanetary snapshots from this weekend's Mars landing. At left:

"This mosaic image taken by the navigation camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been further processed, resulting in a significantly improved 360 degree panoramic view of the rover on the surface of Mars."

Link to NASA's Mars moblog, link to full-size, 360-degree composite panorama image. (Thanks, Warren)

New York City is auctioning off property seized in busts. Great deals on hot goods.

Link

(Thanks, noel!)

"Aunty Flidais' Guide to Dating in Dereth" is a high-larious machinima shot in the video game Asheron's Call and edited together into a kind of "Sex Tips for the Modern Avatar" educational film.

22MB DivX Link

(Thanks, Ockham!)

How to rip records into mp3 format .. Not as easy as you might think .. digitize your vinyl recordings

nytimes.com/2004/01/01/technology/circuits/01basi.html?pagewanted=all&position=
track this site | 6 links

We knew a truckload of these were inevitable after 8 Mile.. Hopefully there will be some degree of authenticity here, since they had enough sense to let Wordsworth choose the NY emcees. Plus enough sense to recognize NY emcees are...

An insatiable hunger for celebrity gossip is reflected in the popular search terms on Google for 2003.

Boingboing reader fRiT0 says:

The Curta mechanical calculator and its story are featured in the January 2004 issue of Scientific American and a Google search turned up this excellent website with information and pictures regarding this truly incredible device. The Curta is a mechanical calculator that was designed by Curt Herzstark while he was imprisioned in a Nazi concentration camp. It is a facinating instrument and a Curta in good condition is worth $1000+ on ebay.

Futurismic, a terrific group-blog run by sf writers, has decided to begin publishing fiction online, paying a nominal-but-respectable $100 per story. I love this idea, if for no other reason than it will give a bunch of writers an opportunity to read "slush" (unsolicited manuscripts), something that really helped me learn what mistakes new writers make and how to avoid them. Some other stuff I like: in an era when most magazines still insist on paper submissions, they're only reading via the Web, and insisting on ASCII, pasted into a form, for submissions. ASCII is the new PDF!

Stories should be compelling and well written, with a strong emphasis on characters confronting or embracing imminent cultural, social, technological, and scienctific changes. Post-cyberpunk, Information Age, and near-future extrapolations will be welcomed--serious or satirical, straight-forward or gonzo, optimistic or pessimistic. We are not interested in fantasy, horror, or more conventional SF themes such as space opera, time travel, first contact, or alternate worlds.,,

Our reading period for the first half of our publishing year will begin on January 3, 2004 and end on February 3, 2004. Any manuscripts sent before or after these dates will be deleted unread. Because of the short timeframe, you may send two stories during this reading period, but please do so in separate submissions. We'll begin to respond some time in mid-February, and hope to respond to all submissions within three months of the reading period's closing. At this time we're only planning to publish one story per month, so only six stories will be accepted during each reading period. (The second reading period of the year should occur in July 2004.)

Link

tv - 0 notes - tv4all - portal to live streams from many tv channels worldwide

fanatical fans are something few companies ever get lucky enough to have

The NYT has published its list of most-forwarded stories from 2003.

MARCH 15 (No. 75) The tale of a carp that shouted in Hebrew, shattering the calm of a New York fish market and creating what many called a miracle.

Link

the ultimate effort to bridge the divide, and it sounds like it has fantastic potential