Fjording the digital divide

Internet Archive Brings Free Ultra High-Speed Internet to Public Housing

Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to preserving a record of the Internet and to increasing access to the Internet, today began offering free Internet service to public housing projects at speeds far greater than any other city resident can receive.

Valencia Gardens Housing, with 240 units, is the first area to be connected in a pilot project that expects to wire more than 2,500 units in the city in the next eight months, according to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.

What makes the project unique is that the apartments will be connected to the Internet, and to the educational resources at the Internet Archive, at 100 megabits per second (Mbits/second). That speed contrasts sharply with the normal Internet service offered by telephone companies, which is usually less than 6 Mbits/second.

The residents can instantly view DVD-quality videos of the thousands of lectures and other educational information from the Internet Archive's collections, as well as traditional Internet access.

The Internet Archive is able to achieve this high speed by connecting the San Francisco municipal fiber optic network, which runs through the public housing developments, to an Archive switching center, which connects to the Internet.

“We are pleased to be the first non-profit organization to bring public housing online,” Kahle said.

He added: “We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology.”

NYtimes: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/low-income-residents-get-high-speed-access/

CNET: http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9904821-52.html

ValleyWag: http://valleywag.com/373658/brewster-kahles-internet-archive-brings-broadband-to-sf-housing-projects

Romona has a posse

My fairly recent relocation has helped with the goal of being exposed to great minds. At the Archive, its common to discover an MIT educated, computer science, buddy of our founder wandering the halls. It's an inspiring intellectual atmosphere.

The progression seems to have gone, hearing or reading about the big minds, seeing their lectures and appearances, to working around them. Still another layer to peel before working directly with those included in the inner circle of expanding consciousness. Ray Kurzweil is one of the biggest of those minds.

This month's Wired magazine has an eight page piece about the futurist and inventor. If immortality can be achieved through concentrated brilliance and theoretical mathematics, Kurzweil will be the one to do it. Even the LGBTQ community can love a man that wants to transcend gender through the recompiling his conscience in a synthetic lifeform named Ramona.

While the concept of expanding consciousness through technology might seem strange to some, it is considered inevitable by many artificial intelligence experts, including Dr. Bruce Runnegar, UCLA professor and former director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute (NAI); Digital Space Corporation CEO and researcher, Bruce Damer; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, foremost researcher in Friendly AI at the Singularity Insitute.

read Wired article

boldly going

Last week's story on the Mind Game Controller looked into emerging technologies used to entertain the minds of humans. We've grown accustomed to digital gaming technology being in the forefront of computer engineering. The boundary between purely biological lifeforms and strictly artificial lifeforms has blurred with a recent announcement.

Clive Thompson on Why the Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind

The Wired article, linked above, could easily cause significant anxiety. This could be an area of the unknown worthy of fear. Human ingenuity at circumventing supposedly fool proof systems can be counted on to find new and interesting hacks for the mind reading technology. It brings up a whole new concept for the crime of identity theft.
Or you could think someone into a James T. Kirk level of agony.
or for those with a dystopian outlook on life we bring you, straight from the Dept of Defense, a video exibiting the ironically titled Active Denial System.

Personalized fit

This week's project was mentioned in the previous post and John's response reminded me of something that is a natural part of my teaching process. Tailoring material to fit the individual remains a priority in my design and development of appropriate instruction. The last post serves as a good example of the process in action.

At the moment, the primary audience for this blog consists of three grad students -a techie, a science teacher, and a sports management expert - who are all taking an instructional computing course at the same time. A few others check in occasionally, but for the most part that's our group. With such a small collection of readers, it's fairly simple to pick examples of interest to the other members.

So John mentioned in a response that it was cool to discuss something he was interested in. The choice of material was intentional. A story combining science, technology, and sports seemed to be much more compelling than forcing my course mates to read only what I think is noteworthy.

How many classes are designed around standards, testing, and defined criteria, but forget that we are individuals with specific interests, desires, and passions? This has been a point of frustration for me in the past. After coming to the realization, that extraordinary courses would be uncommon by the very nature of their being extraordinary, my design and use of individualized educational technology has flourished. Maintaining this approach in the face of criticism, unbelief, and difficult authority figures has not been easy. Maturity and experience have been helpful, but intellectual honesty has been the most helpful trait.

Controlling the world with your mind

There's this nagging feeling, I've overlooked something in Second Life. Earlier posts have alluded to this distraction. Asking questions, seeing what other minds are writing , and visiting the multimedia coverage on the most well-known metaverse have all been distractions of late.

In respect to how this synchs up with any biotechnology application, a recent development in brainwave identification technology appears promising "biomelds." Biomelds are the biological equivalent of browser mash-ups in the information technology world, an add-on that enhances a pre-existing organism. Oscar Pistorius represents something close to a biomeld, but his add-on is at the macro level and doesn't get all the way down to the micro, nerve and digital connection, level.

The following serve as more appropriate examples of recent biomeld developments:


A nanotechnology biosensor for Salmonella detection

Nanovalves for Drug Delivery: A nanoscopic valve that responds to pH changes.

Eye Implants for Cats Could Help Blind Humans See

What does all this have to do with brainwaves and Second Life? A thought experiment, initiated during an Instructional Computing class at UF, collided smack into this story describing a cybertelekinetics biomeld called Mind Gaming. The headset in the Mind Games application taps into the wearer's thought patterns and brain physiology to control external movement. As recounted by Joel Garreau, in his book Radical Evolution, testing with the brain signals of primates into manipulating electromechanical devices has been taking place for sometime at DARPA, the secret defense research organization. With Emotiv's Mind Game controller being released this year, the behind closed door science of the military is quickly becoming the rest of the world's reality.

The class project is to identify design alterations based on present knowledge in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. We can pick anything to redesign, so my thoughts have drifted to melding the brainwave controller with one or more of the educational, immersive, virtual environments; appropriate examples of which are Second Life, Gaia, 3D learn, and Whyville. Follow up postings to this project are forthcoming.

Any ideas? What would you do with this new toy?

Power of the People

How do we enact change?

The biological evolutionary process provides some clues. A few, small adaptations occur over a long period of time. The mutations that work best survive to be passed on to subsequent generations.

Can this work for ideas? Richard Dawkins calls them memes. What questions are sparked by Dr. Dawkin's concept and how has the cumulative effect of seemingly minuscule alternations in our cultural consciousness altered our world?

Come one, come all!

Since we have new viewers, let's cover this blog's basic features.

Purpose
Identify new developments in cognition and human augmentation(transhumanism), as well as to examine the intersections where human culture and biotechnology interact.

Navigation
On the right hand side, you can step up to the video bar where you will find the weekly video selection. And under the bar, is a daily feed of news aggregated from Ray Kurzweil's Artificial Intelligence Net. The rest is the usual Archive and Profile information. This week we will start the BS (Biotech and Society)blogroll.

Enjoy,

Be nice; say hello to the bearded lady on your way out.

Has Second Life lost its luster?

Second Life Pageviews expressed as a percentage of available audience over a three year span.


http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1407952648/bctid1443716894


The Second Life(SL) video, linked above, is the multimedia companion to the three page San Francisco Chronicle article in Sunday's Travel Section. Are things going great at SL? Linden Labs, the San Francisco based creator of SL, appears to be populated with upbeat workers, but there are those declining numbers to give you pause.

Our easily distracted, conventional media, outside the Bay Area might have found some other shiny new toy. On the popular Digital Campus podcast, from the Center for History and New Media, the moderators seriously questioned the role a virtual world such as Second Life plays in education. This back and forth has been going on for a couple of years with many institutions represented in SL Education Programs.

The many and varied opinions are the lot we have earned by the thoroughness of our of information webs. Avatars might be fashionable today, but keep an eye out for an evolving grid.