“Elementary school children in Korea in the cities of Masan and Daegu are among the first to be exposed to EngKey, a robotic teacher. The arrival of EngKey to Masan and Daegu is just a small step in the mechanization of Korean classrooms: the Education Ministry wants all 8400 kindergartens in the nation to have robotic instructors by the end of 2013. Plans are already under way to place 830 bots in preschools by year’s end. EngKey can hold scripted conversations with students to help them improve their language skills, or a modified version can act as a telepresence tool to allow distant teachers to interact with children.”

Via /..

Artist and photographer Francois Robert uses real human bones in his creations:

Link and photo via Environmental Graffiti.

Make has an excellent guide to setting up your own home lab:

As is true of most hobbies and other organized activities, if you’re going to do home science, it’s desirable to have a dedicated place to do it. But dedicated lab space is by no means essential. After all, when most people think of home science the image that comes to mind is a kid working with a chemistry set at the kitchen table. Even if the kitchen table is the only available place to work, you can get a lot of home science done.

But before you settle on the kitchen table, give serious consideration to other possible locations for your home lab. Of course, you may have to choose between using the kitchen table and having no lab at all. In that case, do the best you can with what you have to work with. Here are some things to think about when you choose a location for your home lab.

From slashgear, a prototype Retinal Imaging Display:

The images projected directly onto your retina simulate a 16-inch screen viewed for about three feet away according to the maker. The tech came from the Brother printer tech for laser and ink jet printers. The AirScouter will be launched in Japan for industrial uses like overlaying manuals on machinery. That is pretty cool and I could see a market for this thing in the DIY realm for folks that like to fix things themselves. Nothing like step-by-step directions clipped to your eyeball.

Thanks and hat tip to @bindychild!

Last weekend I attended WorldCon, here in Melbourne. Five days running amok in the mindcandy store; sitting at the foot of the Elders and drinking in their knowledge. (Also, why I’ve been quiet on here of late).

I have roughly 10 pages crammed with notes still to process, but the one thing that most stuck with me was the repeated statement by Charles Stross that we are living amongst the Future Shocked.

I am delighted to discover that after returning home, he has expanded upon this:

I’d just like to note that the past decade or so seems to have been marked by a worldwide upwelling of bigotry and intolerance. And it’s not only the extremist fringes of every religious creed that are to blame here, although they’re part of the picture (and no religion seems to be free of turbulent loons around the edges). We have extremist, eliminationist rhetoric in American political discourse, combined with a hair-raising outbreak of ethnophobia directed at muslims. We have France and Italy deporting Roma (illegally; they’re EU citizens and have an absolute right of residence), in a move fuelled by a wave of xenophobia that bears unpleasant echoes of 1940-45. A wave of petty authoritarianism in the UK has led to the installation of all the well-oiled machinery of a police state — now in disarray due to an epochal political upset, but deeply alarming to anyone concerned for civil liberties in the past decade. Australia had its great firewall debate. Russia’s government is increasingly authoritarian, harking back to the Soviet era in methods and goals (now with less revolutionary ideology).

…

It’s about forty years since “Future Shock” was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers’ predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread insecurity. They didn’t nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite disaster capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I’m inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (And it looks as if the UK and USA are finally on the receiving end of disaster capitalism at home, in the post-2008 banking crisis era.)

My working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Tofflers underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It’s no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate. Climate change is an exceptionally potent trigger for future shock insofar as it promises an unpleasant and unpredictable dose of upcoming instability in the years ahead; denial is an emotionally satisfying response to the threat, if not a sustainable one in the longer term.

Deep craziness: we’re in it, and there’s probably not going to be any reduction in the prevalence of authoritarian escapism until we collectively become accustomed to the pace of change. Which will, at a minimum, not happen until the older generations have died of old age — and maybe not even then.

For those who came in late, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock is the ‘secret text’ of 80s cyberpunk.  It occupied a similar space in what Alan Moore calls the IdeaSpace then, that the Singularity does today.  It only follows that if we’re living in the cyberpunk futurepresent, as I have contended, then we should also be in the presence of an Future Shock epidemic .

Stross is far from the first to have made this statement.  Bruce Sterling, made a similar statement at the end of his Long Now lecture in 2004:

The loss of the future is becoming acute. The most effective political actors on the planet right now are guys who want to blow themselves up—they really DON’T want to get out of bed in the morning and face another day. People need a motivating vision of what comes next and the awareness that more will happen after that, that the future is a process not a destination

I highly recommend listening to the full lecture:

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To change things, we first have to understand the current situation.  This is an important idea in that toolkit.

“What if we could have altered the track of Katrina?”

“Owning the Weather” is a documentary about geo-engineering by Robert Greene. It’s about whether or not we should engineer the weather and the different impacts that this has. And not only because we can, but also because actually we are already doing so.

Words and video via Next Nature.

See also:

Head of Weather Manipulation

To create Brilliant Noise, Semiconductor (aka Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), went through hundreds of thousands of computer files to select some of the sun’s most spectacular and unseen moments and compose a video animation on the oscillations of the star. Taken by orbiting satellites, the images reveal the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise.

Through a process of audio data processing, Semiconductor used images to control the fluctuations of sound. The sound varies, crackles, buzzes and falters according to the brightness of the image, highlighting the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface.

Words and video from we-make-money-not-art.com.

Here’s the teaser trailer for a forthcoming documentary “exploring mankind’s journey to ‘play jazz with the universe’… it is a story of our ultimate potential, the reach of our intelligence, the scope of our scientific and engineering abilities and the transcendent quality of our heroic and noble calling.”

Know Your Meme has a handy guide to fighting YouTube takedown requests for content – this time focused on the downfall of the Downfall videos.  While admitting that DMCA challenges are more complicated than YouTube’s own internal system for taking down content at the copyright holder’s request – it is always fascinating to see how people fight back when copyright holders try to trample on Fair Use.

[Via Everybody]

Via scaryideas.com.

If you love futuristic musical madness, then these bizarre charts and mathematically-transformed pieces of sheet music from artist Marco Fusinato will delight you. Think of them as the abstract underpinnings for a movie like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.

Fusinato brings together avant garde music and art in his work, creating imagery that looks like the results of a mad scientist’s musings on how sound functions. In this series of drawings, called Mass Black Implosion, he’s transformed scores for avant garde works into suggestions for what he calls “free noise,” by changing the order of the notes and suggesting new relationships between them. Basically he’s suggested a way to make something abstract even more abstract. In the process, he’s created charts that are gorgeously strange.

Link via io9.com, which contains a gallery of more fantastic images.

Outlaw Biology, present by the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and Art/Sci, presented a symposium, workshop and exhibition this weekend.

A symposium exploring new forms of public participation in biological research, raising questions and cultivating ideas about how life could and should be studied. Panelists will address issues including do-it-yourself biology, open source science, at home medical genetics, bio-art, and novel ethical engagements with science at the cutting edge. Event schedule includes: Friday, a panelist discussion with artists, scientists and normal people; Saturday, workshops and an open-house exhibition throughout.

A tentative list of workshops and exhibitions included:

1. Bioweathermap, Jason Bobe. With field-trips to the UCLA Arboretum and Hammer Museum (in cooperation with Machine Project

2. Learn to Design a DNA-based nanostructure using cadnano software, Philip Lukeman

3. Paint colorful microbes – luminescent, fluorescent, and pigmented – on do-it-yourself solid media. With a little time and luck, we’ll preserve the painted results in epoxy, like microbiological paintings in amber, Mackenzie Cowell

4. SKDB: Learn to use software tools for open source manufacturing and bioengineering, Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz

5. Use of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus strain ADP1 as a DIY bioengineering platform, David Metzgar

6. Ars Synthetica: Have an informed, ethical, and open dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology, Gaymon Bennett

7. Extract DNA from Strawberries, CSG Staff

8. Lactobacillus Plasmid Recovery and Visualization for fun and profit, Meredith L. Patterson

9. DIY Webcam Microscopy. Join us for a worldwide webcam hacking event and make your own 100x USB microscope for less than $10. We’ll provide the webcams and a live internet feed from other workshop locations across the world, from Bangalore to Australia. Find out more at diybio.org/ucam

10. Velolab, See the first Bicyclized Mobile Biology lab, Sam Starr

Any future Beethoven’s in the house?

Oh my goodness this is cute. The design you’re about to experience is called “Original Sound Track” and it’s basically a sound box flipped inside out and turned into a train on tracks. Set up your tracks, which have pins in them in just the right places, wind up your train car and set it on the tracks, and wowie! You’ve got your own little sound compilation! Made for kids, but who am I to say you adult figures can’t have one for yourself.

When this train makes it to production, it will come with 10 pieces of track which can be arranged in any number of different ways, allowing for the kid who runs it to make lots of different fresh songs! Then, just like any good modern toy, this train has song tracks you can buy separately. I’ll be in line the day they release the Chemical Brothers tracks! Or the Kraftwerk tracks – how awesome would that be?

This toy is basically GOING to inspire creativity and growth in cognitive ability in any child that uses it. Arranging music is intense – this is by far the simplest way to get a child excited about creating real amazing songs. Who DOESNT want their kid to become a composer!?

Video and link via yankodesign.

A video of the 70+ images that were submitted was created:

Link via medgadget.com. Photos of all the top thirty winners can be found here, but I liked this one the best.

In Bangladesh, people routinely stack mountainous piles of bricks onto their heads when loading and unloading the boats and Bedford trucks used to transport clay-fired bricks from the kilns where they are made to the construction sites where they are used. These feats of endurance and equilibrium look near inconceivable to blinkered Western eyes, but for the brick carriers it’s all in a day’s work.

That stack of some 20 bricks is almost as tall as the man carrying it, yet he still has room to flip a few more on top and walk the plank onto dry land. After this initial effort, workers often have to carry their precarious piles some distance, and when on site climb several flights of stairs to the rooftops where the bricks will be laid. Without wheelbarrows, single-minded stability is all that stands between a slip and tens of kilos of bricks falling – and perhaps even a snapped neck.

Words and link from environmentalgraffiti.com.

Designed by artist Harold Hoy:

The works of Harold Hoy have centered on the complex relationship between mankind and the natural world. Hoy’s current body of work is constructed of galvanized steel and pipe hanger material and is based partly on an erector set. He uses the child’s toy as a platform to work around larger issues of man’s predilection for claiming ownership of the natural world and our desire to manipulate and re-form it.

From makezine.com.

One of many, via we-make-money-not-art.com.

Persona. Ritual Masks and Contemporary Art features 180 ritual masks brought side by side with contemporary works by African artists or African diaspora members, which explore the question of identity, self-respect and representation of the Other.

The Guards Chapel, spiritual home of the Household Division of the British Army, is host to an installation that looks at some of the present-day thoughts on heroes. Complete Hero is a projection-based artwork by Martin Firrell.

From mocoloco.com.

Gorgeous animation about a viral infection:

NPR’s Robert Krulwich sat down with David Bolinsky of XVIVO, a firm that makes amazing animations for medicine and life sciences, to explain to the general public how viruses infect cells and reproduce themselves. For demonstration they used animation XVIVO produced for Zirus, a company developing novel methods to fight pathogenic viruses.

Link via medgadget.