 |
Thursday, October 20, 2005 |
|
There have been lots of interesting developments around the recent activities around the most recent earthquake in Pakistan and India. I haven't been able to blog much around them, but here's a little communications system set up by the members of the TsunamiHelp, KatrinaHelp and AsiaquakeHelp team : "An SMS reporter blog has been set up - mail sms2blog@gmail.com or send an SMS [to a Pakistan cellphone number, Imran Hashmi] at +923008568418 and he will forward it to the blog. Your reports will not appear on the blog instantly, because of a blogger glitch, but the blog admins will take turns republishing the blog as often as possible. Your post should appear on the site within an hour, on the average. The SMS Quake blog is dedicated to first person reports from the affected area, and is open to anyone. Repeat: Anyone. You don't have to be a member of the blog." This should be automated - its something we're working on. More documentation at the wiki. We couldn't use Skype this time round, since Skype doesn't have local numbers in India or Pakistan for us to buy a SkypeIn account for people to call into. 11:55:34 PM  comment [] trackback []
|
|
Theo Jansen builds mechanical creatures that walk on beaches! Beach animals, whose knees sag, some who die out in minutes. And who have mechanisms to guard against being blown away by the wind. They gather sand at the end of their tails, and each day when they retire, they unload this sand back on the beaches. Probably changing its topography :). He demos a beach beast to us on stage .. the motion is so incredibly smooth. They're having fun in the chatroom, thinking up new applications for these animals - Star Wars killer bots, New Orleans Flood Navigators, Starship trooper bugs. Amazing stuff. And a real treat listening to him. A wild combination of mad scientist and artist. Check out some of his animal movies here. And Wired had a nice article on his work. 9:35:09 PM comment [] trackback []
|
|
Norman Packard of ProtoLife, who is working in the areas of chaos, learning algorithms, predictive modeling of complex time series, statistical analysis of evolution, artificial life, and complex adaptive syste is talking about Living Technologies. He starts with the question - What is Life ? Life requires self-maintenance, self-reproduction and evolvability. He defines living technology as tech that is defined and enanced by its life-like properties. egs he gives - social engineering, ecological engineering, synthetic biology and even the internet. He gives the example of Synthetic Biology - two approaches - top-down and bottom-up. And shares his experience with a bottom-up project he is involved in. What's interesting to me is the central concept of giving up derivability and learning to harness emergence. I think some of these concepts are being embraced by the internet and its social nature. We came close with the Tsunamihelp experience, and evolving with each effort around recent disasters. 9:06:56 PM comment [] trackback []
|
|
Its great to be back in Camden Maine and at Pop!Tech. I got here yesterday, and it is so wonderful to see this little town being filled out by people from all over the world for this very special event. Was stopped by a few locals and asked is it Poptech time already! It was good to meet familiar persons, and many more new friends at the Cocktails yesterday. Did some Mehta-Mehta bonding with Suketu (Maximum City) Mehta's proud parents and ate lots of mussels. Its the first session here and Andrew Zolli is back on stage, in his inimitable style. This session today is about 'Seeing What's There'. The first presentation from Graham Flint, was great from a technical viewpoint of how you can take some amazing photographs with super-high resolutions - the big benefit being you can interact with the image. There would be privacy and legal issues of course, and this was raised in the Popchat dialogue. Dr. Robert Hanner took us through one of the grand challenges of biology - what's truly out there - how many species - 10 mn ? 100 mn ? And how DNA Barcoding species would also have social implications by helping democratise access, make it available, and as a result, bring us so much closer to the species. Interesting question from a lady in the audience on how, having seen what is out there, how do they plan to preserve civilisation. The answer from the speakers -- we dont know how good the storage mechanisms are. And, I liked this quote from one of the presentations ... so just reprinting it here: "Research is to see what everyone else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought" Albert SzentGyorgyi. Ethan is liveblogging Poptech here. 8:24:52 PM comment [] trackback []
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
