a weblog about visual markers, containing only (originally Japanese) postings that are encoded as QR codes. thought: would it be possible to develop a visual QR code protocol that is valid & understandable in all languages? [qrcodeblog.com|via ubiks.net]

OPEN SOURCE METHODS AND THEIR FUTURE POTENTIAL| The principles of 'open source' - collaborative forms of creating knowledge pioneered in software development - look set to have a transforming impact on many areas of business, government and daily life, according to a new Demos report written by Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation, and Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.org. |SmartMobs|

usermilk writes "Some folks at MIT are holding a time-travelers' convention. The idea is to make it so famous and so widely-known that even thousands of years in the future, people will still know exactly when and where this time-traveler convention went down, and will all come travel to it at some point in their illustrious time-traveling careers. For those interested in attending, it's on May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) in the East Campus Courtyard at MIT. 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)."

reality mining explores a huge dataset on individual & group human behavior by capturing communication, proximity, location, & activity information from 100 subjects at MIT. several different interactive visualizations have been implemented to represent this huge, time-based dataset (approximately 350,000 hours or ~40 years of continious data on call logs, bluetooth devices in proximity, cell tower IDs, application usage, & phone status such as charging/idle). [mit.edu & thefeature.com|via boingboing.net]

Amazing three dimensional hand-drawing in Quicktime Panorama format. A hand-drawn virtual world...

click and drag and gawk --ACB

the global consciousness project is an international & multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers & artists to look for patterns in many, physically remote random number generators. this initiative searches for subtle correlations in continuous, computationally generated random data streams that could reflect the presence & activity of 'consciousness' in the world (e.g. forewarning 9/11 or the asian tsunami). various real-time visualizations of these random data streams have been developed, such as tapestries, block diagrams and data-driven music. [princeton.edu]

"Wednesday, April 27, 2005 shows a dust storm across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday April 26, 2005. The storm spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. (AP Photo/US Army, Sgt Shannon Arledge)"

Update: More at Snopes and BBC.

Paris based designers Jean-Marie Massaud and Daniel Pouzet of Studio Massaud, clearly have a wonderful imagination. These are computer generated images of a new soccer stadium set to look like a mexican volcano--they won a competition to design this new stadium. Advertisements will be projected on the "cloud" above, which will be made of stretched fabric to protect spectators from the elements. The rest of the stadium will be set inside the volcano shaped hill. Their is a nice interview with the designers at Interior Design.

Via WMMNA

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Posted in: Future

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White Noise/White Light, an interactive sound and light installation first presented in Athens for the Olympic Games, will be open to the public on May 2-8 on the MIT Campus.

As pedestrians enter into this grid of fiber optics and speakers, their movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LEDs and white noise from speakers below. If motion is detected, the white LED illumination grows brighter while the white noise increases in volume, a flickering wake of light and noise trails and traces visitors as they cross the field. When there is no motion, the light and sound fade into dimness and silence.

Depending on the time of day, number of people, and trajectories of movement, the project is constantly being choreographed by the cumulative interaction of the public.

The white noise made for the project is based on the Johnson noise phenomenon, where noise arises from the thermal motions of electrons in a resistor carrying current in an electronic circuit. This field of white noise creates a sound-scape masking out the noises from the immediate context.

"White noise, like white light, is an aggregation, composed of all possible sounds, just as white light encompasses all possible colors," says J. Meejin Yoon, Assistant Professor with the Department of Architecture at the MIT. "The gentle murmur of 'White Noise/White Light' forms a place of sonic refuge within the city."

Video of the work in Athens.

News and images from Archinect.

When Rebecca Anema goes snowboarding with her friends she sometimes looses sight of them. So she decided to make a social GPS to see where she is and where friends are in relation to the mountains.

The system combines a GPS map (altitude, longitude) with an x,y map (trail map, street address) and a social map (where friends are).

The J2ME application runs on GPS enabled phones. It communicates with the GPS to find out your location and sends the data to the database. It also checks who your buddies are and displays their location on your phone screen.

The system is useful anywhere people travel in a group.
The work will be presented at the ITP Spring show on May 10-11, in New York.

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Eyebeam has organized a contest on the theme of contagious media, the idea being to come up with a meme (project, hoax, web page, joke) that gets you the most hits within a certain period of time. This occupies an awkward zone between social sculpture (art), public relations (not art), new media art, and web-development-as-usual. Participants in the workshops include Nick Denton of Gawker media, who didn't wait to see how the unruly and amorphous new form of expression called "blogging" would evolve but rather led the charge in turning it into something streamlined and branded a la the late 90s dot com model. Blogs under the Gawker umbrella are much like the one you're reading except they have nicer logos and blinking ads interspersed with the copy. They do get hits though. This page has had a couple of mentions on a site called Screenhead (thanks, mon) and both times stats spiked big time.

Speaking of stats, mine are great, thanks. Numbers aren't crowed about here like they frequently are at Josh Marshall's blog but let's just say they're very encouraging and I appreciate everyone who reads. One of the discussions I had early on with fellow bloggers at Digital Media Tree (a collective that is the brainchild of tech whiz Jim Bassett) is that blogging isn't like dot coms because it isn't about number of eyeballs but quality of eyeballs. "Paradigms (memes, whatever) grow around communities of strong interest" is another way of saying it. Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't--you never know what's going to be important in the long or short run. But a perverse thing about the Internet is too much success can destroy the effort before it begins: bandwidth costs money, and more traffic makes blogging more expensive. To accommodate the traffic you have to upgrade and put up ads or a tip jar to keep going.

It can be exhilirating to have a contagious project take off, but recent history teaches us the party's quickly over and you're left picking up your guests' cigarette butts. The only solutions to the problem of the hit meme are to embrace capitalism, quit while you're ahead, or be like the characters in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," who wear prosthetic devices that blunt their natural talents (thick eyeglasses for painters, heavy ankle weights for ballerinas) so they're perpetually good but not too good.

And when it's all said, what did "Turkish Man Kiss You" and "America We Stand As One" really contribute to the discourse? Is their "success" as ironic artifacts something that could, or should, be deliberately contrived?

Updated slightly to accommodate a good point from someone who seemed mildy surprised that these things getI updated/rewritten after they're posted (let me know if you want credit for the thought in the last sentence). The rule of thumb is if the post changes substantively I do an "update," otherwise it's just sub-Orwellian tweaks.

Christo4 wrote in to tell us about an interesting game-themed art show:

Not really game news, but game-related and very cool.  Photo gallery from Arcade-based art exhibit I Am 8 Bit at LA’s nineteen eighty eight gallery, going on until May 20th. Cool interpretations of golden oldies: WARNING: MASSIVE amount of pics, sorry 56k.

Nice. My favorite is the Stormtrooper photo. It’s almost like a self-portrait.

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Cashen writes "'Verizon Communications Inc. is turning off the free wireless Internet access it beams from New York City telephone booths for DSL subscribers who use laptops away from home or the office.' Full article here. Is it just a coincidence Verizon is expanding its EV-DO in New York at the same time? Guess we have to pay to play now... The real question is, when is EV-DO coming to michigan?"

Speaking of things to chat with Timothy Leary about, you might want to order this piece in for your next rave. The crystal and laser chandelier uses a single crystal in perfect alignment with a laser to generate a disappearing act effect: when the light is out, so is the chandelier. When it catches the laser, the shape of a Swarovski crystal is traced in mid air. Take that, Pink Floyd.

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The latest issue of The New York Review of Books takes on Malcom Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.  I didn't have to read the review. Just reading the title of the book was enough to tell me it was probably a smartly written but insufficiently supported exposition of a clearly erroneous premise. After reading the review, one can only hope that it will act as the final straw to turn the critical tide against this book and send it to the remainder bin....

tezbobobo writes "Tiger been out hours and already the Apple download page has been updated to take advantage of the update's new features. These cover areas including Spotlight plugins, Dashboard plugins, and Automator plugins. These allow a range of actions from searching within omnigraph documents (spotlight), to resizing photoshop documents (automator), and (my fav) a dashboard wireless locator. The best bit -- a cursory glance indicates about half are freeware."

High school students from Arizona beat MIT in the underwater robotics competition

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.

The rural-urban divide remains sharp.

(thanks to Jim Downing

Mark Frauenfelder: This Japanese language site has lots of interior and exterior photos of abandoned buildings in Japan. Link (via i like)

hende_jman writes "Scientists at Princeton University successfully 'programmed bacteria to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.' Though applications may not come for awhile, the article says that in the future this technology may be used in devices to detect bioterrorism chemicals. The article also has pictures of the programmed E. coli."

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.

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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.

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Posted in: Art

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In the wake of my recent posting on the insanity of jetpacks, Brian Corcoran pointed out yet another example of innovative technology designed to augment human abilities, and break every single bone in our bodies: The Springwalker. Pictured above,...

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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David Pescovitz: Researchers say that the chaotic, distracting mess of multiple information streams that is CNN and many other channels today isn't working. (Surprise!) From Kansas State University:

"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.

Link

Dan Lycett of the always interesting Breakingthings is organising ‘Glitch:Aesthetics’ an event dedicated to Glitch Art , the Visual manifestations of computer malfunction and Data Corruption. Glitch has played a big part in the granular synthesis scene in recent years, most notably in the esoteric alchemical drones of Coil and ...

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

photographs ufo pictures

Andrew Bucksbarg : The Prosthetic Component Interface Series

Net.Art

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

Art

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!

Cory Doctorow: Richard Minsky is a book artist whose sculptural slipcases for various books form a bookish Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment version is Neuromancer, with an Ethernet Token Ring card inset. Link (Thanks, Gene!)

gnuman99 writes "A UCLA collaboration (Seth Putterman, Brian Naranjo and Jim Gimzewski) appear to have developed a fusion device powered by a pyroelectric crystal, a type of crystal used in cell phones to filter signals. When heated, such a crystal produces a large electric charge on its surface. The UCLA researchers placed a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal so that one side touches a copper disc. A tiny tungsten probe is then placed at the center of the copper disc. When the crystal is subsequently heated, a very large large electric field is produced at the end of the tugsten tip, ~25 billion volts per meter. This field gradient is so high that it strips the electrons from nearby deuterium atoms. The ionized deuterium atoms then accelerated by this field towards a solid target of erbium deuteride (ErD2). They collide with it at such high energies that some fuse with the target. A measurement of almost 900 neutrons per second was observed. This is 400 times the background! Although the amount of energy produced in this initial experiment was miniscule (~1E-8 jules), this technology could be used for things like microthrusters. There are pictures and movies on the UCLA's physics site." Reader richmlpdx adds a link to coverage at MSNBC.

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.

Mark Frauenfelder: A Chinese poet has built a spherical nest and mounted it on a 10 foot poll pole in a Beijing business district. He plans to live in the nest for a month.

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

Link (Thanks, Ivy!)

Researchers and lab technicians have produced more than 50,000 frame grabs and 1.21 million interpretive annotations. All of this research is available, free of charge, over the Internet through the Knowledge Base and an archival system called the VARS Query system.

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 idea is not just to let people watch old TV programs and films, but to encourage anyone to use the old footage to make entirely new works."

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.

Nick writes "Worldwide, scientists are racing to develop computers that exploit the quantum mechanical properties of atoms - quantum computers. One strategy for making them involves packaging individual atoms on a chip so that laser beams can read quantum data. Scientists at Ohio State University have taken a step toward the development of quantum computers by making tiny holes that contain nothing at all. The holes - dark spots in an egg carton-shaped surface of laser light - could one day cradle atoms for quantum computing."

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]

Human Cells Filmed Instantly Messaging for the First TimeApril 21Newswise - Bioengineering researchers at UCSD and UC Irvine have captured on video for the first time chemical signals that traverse human cells in response to tiny mechanical jabs, like waves spreading from pebbles tossed into a pond. The scientists released the videos and technical details that explain how the visualization effect was created as part of a paper published in the April 21 issue of Nature. The researchers working at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering's Department of Bioengineering developed a novel molecular "reporter" system, which allowed the dynamic visualization of the activation of an important protein called Src. Peter Yingxiao Wang, lead author of the paper and a post-doctoral researcher in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering spent two years designing the reporter molecules to light up selectively only when Src was activated, and not other proteins.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Total U.S. sales of video game hardware, software and accessories rose 23 percent in the first quarter of 2005 to more than $2.2 billion, market research firm NPD Group said on Monday.

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