The growth of broadband connections in Britain has slowed to a crawl, suggesting the digital divide in that nation is even more persistent than was once expected. According to stories in the British press, broadband adoption has his a plateau.

The Oxford Internet Institute this month rushed out findings from its latest survey, for a public sector seminar. Professor Bill Dutton, the Institute's director, said the headline finding is that internet access in Britain has plateaued, at 60%, barely moving from 59% in 2003, and that we are a long way behind the US and parts of Scandinavia. These findings are broadly supported by Ofcom - which intends to investigate this summer - and BT.

(thanks to Jim Downing

Pertaining to the Everyday

Demotic--by Antoinette LaFarge + Robert Allen--is a performance work about American Memory, a single character whose many voices are woven together into a complex texture of language, sound, and music. It is an improvisation among different kinds of performers and different modes of reality, involving sound artists, a theater actor, and a group of Internet-based performers who improvise with text. As an ensemble work in which actors, avatars, and musicians find the music within a wide range of online voices, it is a kind of covert national anthem.

Demotic premiered at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA, on July 29, 30, and 31, 2004. It was broadcast by KUCI 88.9 FM in Irvine on July 31, 2004, and all three performances were webcast live by UCI and Location One gallery, New York via RealMedia streaming audio.

Matt Siber's Floating Logos project accentuates the already looming presence of roadside megabrands. By simply removing the poles, he introduces a bit of surreal humor and religious allusion. Most of the photographs in the series elevate either fast food or oil brands-- a definite Americana statement.

There isn't much you can say about this collaborative art project called "The Zoom Quilt", you just need to see it for yourself. Take a look, and you'll be impressed, and you'll understand why it's so hard to describe. The project allows you to zoom in and out of what seems to be an infinite world, presumably graphics all done by different individual artists. The flash work is pretty impressive and it says it was all done by Paul Hinze.

Sustainability Sundays readers will recognize WEEE -- the EU's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, mandating that manufacturers of electric and electronic devices accept and properly recycle "end of life" equipment. WEEE will become law across the EU this summer, and the directive will go into effect as of January 2006. The goal of WEEE is to reduce the amount of electronic gear going into the waste stream; a corresponding directive, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), limits and prohibits a variety of toxic substances in printed circuit boards.

In order to publicize the onset of WEEE in the UK, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (otherwise known as the RSA) has crafted the WEEE Man, a 7 meter sculpture made up of discarded electric and electronic appliances. The WEEE Man represents all the device waste a single UK citizen will discard in a typical lifetime: 3,300 kilograms, or over 7,200 pounds. The WEEE Man sculpture is now on display on London's South Bank, near Tower Bridge (very close to the location from where I took the photo shown here earlier this year).

The WEEE Man has a "Visible Man meets the Terminator via Best Buy" look to it, and is (in my opinion) remarkable both as a piece of public art and as a piece of public education. (Photos of the sculpture, including a much larger version of the press image used above, can be found here.) The WEEE Man website is also quite interesting, with abundant information about product manufacturing life cycles (including references to Cradle to Cradle and Natural Capitalism), details on the WEEE Directive, even a quick calculator of the estimated footprint of the various mobile phones and PCs in one's life (this last is based on information for EU countries only, so your footprint mileage may vary).

The WEEE Man site also includes a section giving information on what individuals and organizations can do to reduce their device waste footprints. Some of the suggestions are just common sense -- more responsibility in purchases, more recycling and repair of existing gear, that sort of thing -- and some are more technical, particularly the information for businesses needing to comply with WEEE/RoHS.

The RSA developed the WEEE Man project as part of a larger endeavor, an agenda they call Moving Towards a Zero Waste Society. Such a society would require full design for disassembly, cradle-to-cradle production processes, and an aggressive effort to eliminate toxins. It's an ambitious goal -- but ambitious goals are the ones worth pursuing.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in The Means of Expression - Media, Creativity and Experience at 03:52 PM)

Ottawa-based Frontline Robotics have developed robots that use distributed intelligence to make decisions as groups. The Robotic Open Control (ROC) software essentially operates by allowing the robots to elect a leader to make critical decisions at crunch times. In the event that the lead robot is unable to fulfill his duties, the team elects another. Being able to co-ordinate actions in response to the other robots in the group leads to the evolution of problem solving strategies more complex than robots acting alone. Right now the software is being deployed in commercially available four-wheeled unmanned rover vehicles called GRUNTs. At 1000 pounds and 6.5 feet in length, these beefy little robots are outfitted with radio communication, imaging cameras, night-vision sensors, radar, and GPS. Maxing out at speeds of about 19 miles per hour, the GRUNTs can spin twice on the spot in one second, making them rather agile dancers, to boot.

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"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."

For their research, Bergen, Grimes and Potter conducted a series of four experiments that examined people's attention spans regarding complex and simple cognitive processes.

"The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content," Grimes said.

From a fantastic gallery of UFO images at the Black Vault archive of US Government documents obtained under the freedom of information act.

Andrew Bucksbarg : The Prosthetic Component Interface Series

From Troika studios a handheld battery powered projector which projects text messages.

The Resonance project “explores the nature of invisible yet discernible material forces and the impact of these vibrating energies on our environment and the human body.” The show, @ the Oboro gallery in Montreal invites “artists to create works in response to Nikola Tesla’s (1856-1943); pioneering concepts. Tesla’s innovations were based on the principles of vibration and resonance in the fields of electricity and electromagnetism.” Sounds pretty cool - Artists in the show include one of my favorite, of all-time artists - Norman T White - inventor of the “Helpless Robot". And it is curated by the ever-so-talented, Nina Czeglady - so def go check it out if you are in the area!

Eyebeam's Contagious Media Showdown is an open competition to see who can create the most viral web project. Artists, comics, geeks, and designers are encouraged to compete. Now is your last chance to guarentee a space on the official contagious media server.

Sign up here!!!

And don't forget to come to the workshops on May 7th. You can get tips on your contest entry or just drop by to see what contagious media is all about. Reserve your spot by RSVPing.

A European project called CyberWalk is about to develop a walking platform which will allow unconstrained movement in virtual worlds. The platform will be used to study human spatial cognition and movement in space, but later will also allow visits to historical sites or help improve training for athletes in virtual environments.

3D virtual towns, scenes and situations are presented to the viewer via a projection screen or specialized glasses equipped with small projectors. Viewers will be able to move within and interact with the virtual environment. As soon as they turn to the right, they will see the same virtual scene but from another visual angle - the same as in a natural environment.

Such virtual worlds will be used to study complex human behavior patterns under quasi-natural conditions.

The core of the CyberWalk walking environment will be a five meter diameter CyberCarpet. It will consist of thousands of small, loosely pivoted spheres - similar to oversized ball-bearings. The spheres are propelled by a treadmill mounted on a turntable, allowing to transport a person walking on the CyberCarpet back to the centre of the platform without them noticing.

Via Singularity News.

Yefu took only a few necessary things with him, including a cup, a mobile phone, and bedding. Except for perhaps meeting some unsolvable problems, the poet will not leave the 4-square-meter space for the whole month. However, he will report his condition to the organizers by cell phone messages three times a day. The organizers will prepare dinners for him. Yefu hopes the nest life experience could help him write a new book

AR/VR:Mind/Body

"ABSTRACT: In augmented reality (AR) environments, users experience the physical environment and other users directly along with the mediated virtual objects embedded in the environment. In immersive virtual reality (VR), the user's experience of a visual environment (and sometimes other senses) is completely mediated. The representation of the user's body in virtual environments granted us new research territory in dualistic interaction between the mind and body: how do the virtual body and the user's mind interact (with) one another and eventually effect the user's behaviors in the envrionment? An experiment was conducted to explore the potential effect of users' and interactant's bodies to sense of presence in VR and AR environments. Results from the study suggest that the absence of representation of the user's body in VR environments may lessen (her) sense of spatial presence compared with AR environments." From Comparing Differences in Presence during Social Interaction in Augmented Reality versus Virtual Reality Environments: An Exploratory Study by Tang, A., Biocca, F., and Lim, L. (2004).

Chaise is a CD/DVD magazine containing over 5 hours of works by emerging artists: music, films, animation, stickers and posters as PDF on the DVD-rom, interactive artwork, etc.

Best thing is that the magazine is distributed for free, either at venues or to anyone who sends a self-addressed stamped envelope.

If you're lucky enough to be in the New York area on May 6, don't miss their Release Party for some free issues of Chaise and loads of performances.

Highlights on their website include Luke Fischbeck's The Sympathizer, an application for OS X that sings along as you work by converting data from the latency in your computer's graphics redraw into simple rhythmic and melodic patterns; Camp Lakachian, an animation by Bennett Baker Barbakow and Chris Smith (pictured here); Joe Winter's Myano world tour, a performance in which a young man hauls his technologically enhanced piano across the urban landscape in search of electrical outlets that will allow him to plug in and perform; and many many more.

Elliott Malkin’s digital graffiti project, eRuv: a Street History in Semacode, uses semacodes to deliver historical audio content to New Yorkers and tourists following the route of the former 3rd Avenue elevated train in Lower Manhattan. The line marked a historical religious boundary known as an eruv for the immigrant Polish Chasidic Jewish community who inhabited the area during the first half of last century. Locations along the route are marked with semacode IDs, which are cameraphone-readable 2D barcodes that encode data. Participants read the codes to receive the audio relevant to that location, and can leave their own voice messages with their experiences of the spot or reactions to the stories. It definitely beats those cheesy cassette-tape tours usually offered to tourists.

[Via Near Near Future]

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The 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival began April 22 and encompasses more than 70 exhibitions, performances, and workshops in the Greater Boston Area. Since 1999, the biennial festival has brought together artists who work with cutting-edge technologies to show work, discuss the ways new technologies are impacting art practice, and share skills with each other. This year marks the addition of a new conference to the Cyberarts Festival: Ideas in Motion: Innovations in Dance, Movement, and Technology. As means of real-time interactivity between the body and computers become more accessible, many dancers and choreographers have embraced these innovations, creating complex multi-media performances. Highlighting these novel intersections between the body and various media, the Ideas in Motion conference will feature a keynote address from John D. Mitchell, a professor of the Department of Dance at Arizona State University and an early innovator in the use of computers in dance, as well as performances from a number of dance companies including Troika Ranch (NYC), Mei Be Whatever (NYC), Fico Balet (Slovenia), and Kinodance (Boston). Other highlights of the Cyberarts festival include an exhibition of work incorporating GPS and Satellite Imaging and an interactive installation by Scott Snibbe. - Matt Boch

http://bostoncyberarts.org/

Remote-controlled rats are old news, but the researchers behind the original RC rat project have recently made another breakthrough, demonstrating the ability to switch on the rats’ “sniffer dog” instincts at will. With the new super rats, a controller can steer the rat to a specific location, then switch on the critter’s sniffing senses so they can locate drugs or explosives. The rats themselves are also trained to find the tiny chemical traces from drugs and explosives, so they presumably won’t get distracted if someone is packing some cheese.

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Well here’s something I didn’t expect to see. Thousands of trees floating in the water as part of a logging operation on Vancouver Island. I think it’s actually a strangely beautiful image (thumbnail #1). However, the whole thing becomes a little scary when you see just how many trees are involved; have a look at the number of logs being processed over in Vancouver (thumbnail #2), and there’s thousands more down here.

We’ve also located places where trees are being cut from - for example near Baxter Park in Maine (notice the piles of logs by the side of the road), and also next to the Redwood National Park. Phil says:

This is an image of typical redwood forest clearcutting in Northern California. You can zoom out pretty far and it’s still visible. Also notice that this particular location is right next to redwood national park — and it’s obvious from the satellite photo where the protected land begins. You can discern how recently a clear-cut was made by how green it is — the light brown splotches are most recent. I’ve travelled in this place quite a bit, and the logging companies make efforts to log away from main roads & coastlines, perhaps hoping people don’t notice the amount of clearcutting that still happens. They can’t hide anymore.

How right you are Phil.

On a positive note however, I assume these are giant Redwood trees? Wow, they are huge! Looks like the green ‘ground covering’ is the top of normal sized trees, with these monsters looming above them, apparently up to 350 feet!

Thanks to Jean Lorraine, Jeff Miller, Wes, Karen Pease and Phil.

a novel general-use image color code that mobile phones can snap & transmit to a central server, which recognizes the pattern & pushes back according information. the color code can 'contain' any data, such an URL, a ringtone, an advertisement or a vending machine command. [.colorzip.co.jp|denso-wave.com|via 3yen.com]

So apparently it’s all the rage in the UK for groups of teens to run amok slapping unsuspecting kids or passersby, documenting the whole charade on cameraphones and sending it around via 3G (the article actually nonchalantly says “slap or mug” which seem to us quite different practices not lending themselves to being lumped together so willy-nilly). “Happy slapping” has apparently spread from the UK garage music scene to school playgrounds (as most fads do) and is now taking the nation by storm. The Guardian reports attacks are growing more violent as perps take on adult victims in parks and public places. Let’s pause for a reality check and remember how the media loves to sensationalize this stuff, so it may be happening and it may be growing, but you can probably still walk out of your home and make it to the corner market without getting happy slapped. We hope.

[Via picturephoning]

activities in the game QuakeIII are used as abstract data to control a real-time audio synthesis environment. bot & player locations, view angle, weapon state & local texture data are transferred to a networked computer to create sounds, so that the game play is treated as a performance & composition environment. [selectparks.net|via turbulence.org]

1,000 individually controllable LED lights ordered in a 10x10x10 matrix act as a low resolution 3D television display. live video or audio data are transformed in dynamic light sculpture 'visualizations' in real time. [jamesclar.com]

In the next few months, an artificial brain called Cyc will be put online for the world to interact with.

Cyc features a human trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common sense. It should be able to recognise that in the phrase "the pen is in the box", the pen is a small writing implement, while in the sentence "the box is in the pen", the pen is a much larger corral.

Cyc relates each fact to others within the database. It knows for example, that in the sentence "each American has a president" there is only one president, whereas in the sentence "each American has a mother" there are many millions of mothers.

Cyc can also make deductions about things it has never learned about directly. It can tell whether two animals are related without having been programmed with the explicit relationship between each animal we know of.

When it will be released on the web, people will be able to contribute to its knowledge by submitting questions and correcting it if Cyc gets the answers wrong. Doug Lenat of Cycorp, the system's creator, envisages Cyc eventually being connected to webcams and other sensors monitoring environments around the globe, building its knowledge of the world more or less by itself.

At first, users will get answers to their questions only some of the time because it won't yet have the common sense to understand every question or have the knowledge to answer it. But with the critical mass looming, in three to five years users should expect to get an answer most of the time. Lenat has pledged to make access to Cyc freely available, allowing developers of other AI systems to tap into its fund of common sense to improve the performance of their own systems.

Via New Scientist.