The talented @crystaltips on stage at #lift10 talking Smokescreen and TV for teens
The talented @crystaltips on stage at #lift10 talking Smokescreen and TV for teens
Some pictures from Lift10
LIFT 10: Organiser and superman Laurent Haug doing last minute preparation
LIFT 10: the plenary room, before the people arrive
LIFT 10: Watching @cascio and watching @cascio
LIFT 10: Jamais captures Jamais
DSCF5127
LIFT 10
Arrived at LIFT 10
I’m in Geneva for LIFT, one of my favourite tech get-togethers – http://liftconference.com/lift10
Iumped into Jamais Cascio shortly after I arrived and he gave me some great tips for a lunchtime seminar I was to give at WHO (thanks to Tom Shakespeare for the invite) – based on his lovely Soylent Twitter talk – more here
http://www.openthefuture.com/2010/04/soylent_twitter_talk.html?utm_source=fee… And he took a very nice picture too… http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamais_cascio/4580561321/
http://www.openthefuture.com/2010/04/soylent_twitter_talk.html?utm_source=fee… And he took a very nice picture too… http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamais_cascio/4580561321/
Now we’re into ‘the old new media’ session and I’m sitting between Jamais ( @cascio ) and Anders Nissen ( @4ND3RS ) and letting things happen around me… suppose I should pay attention, but it’s nice just to drift sometimes.
Improbabilty factor 10e1000 and rising -just bumped into Bill Thompson at Luton airport- the musician one. Uber cool
Luton airport. Be still my singing heart
Dream it. Build It.
Dream It. Print It.
[This is also on the BBC News website, athttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10089419.stm ] Imagine a school where a student could sketch out an idea for new design of bicycle and not only draw it in 3-D using a computer-aided design package but actually create a scale-model and test it out, using inexpensive materials and a special printer that they can build themselves in the classroom. That’s the vision put forward by Ben O’Steen, a software engineer with a social conscience who is thinking about the implications of a world where 3-D printers are no longer just expensive prototyping systems for large companies but have fallen into the hands of the masses. He has been inspired by the RepRap, a desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic parts by extruding a heated thermoplastic polymer under computer control, which then sets as it cools and makes a usable object. The RepRap project was started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, who teaches mechanical engineering at Bath University. The schematics and all aspects are freely licensed for anyone to implement or adapt, and the current version, called ‘Mendel’, can be built for around £350. It makes objects from a cheap plastic made from corn starch, so is well within school budgets. The project has inspired thousands of people around the world, with websites dedicated to helping people make their own RepRap and get it working, and online schematics for objects from coathangers to working whistles to models of Gothic cathedrals – that one is available at a website called the ‘Thingiverse’ Although I’d come across the RepRap before it had always been an abstract idea, but seeing Ben talk with such enthusiasm about its potential in education and elsewhere brought home its transformative potential, and made me realise that the future has already arrived, even if it is not yet widely distributed.
And while a technology that offers people the ability to manufacture complex objects at home or in the office is enormously disruptive, we can at least see this one coming. Some writers of speculative fiction have already started engaging with it, including Bruce Sterling, in his lovely short story ‘Kiosk’, and Cory Doctorow, whose novel ‘Makers’ offers us an imagined world of printed objects and an emergent culture of 3-D makers who directly challenge many of the core assumptions of industrial society. I heard Ben speak about the RepRap at a recent conference organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation, along with many other programmers, scholars and activists committed to making all kinds of information available to be freely used, reused, and redistributed, from ‘sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata’ as their website puts it.
His talk was the highlight of the day for me, partly because he had brought a collection of props with him but also because his focus on real-world objects bridged the gap between the sometimes dry discussion of open databases and LinkedData and the day-to-day experiences of the vast majority of people whose lives don’t revolve around technology. As with so many advocates of free and open source solsutions, Ben and his friends are also planning to turn engagement into action by offering to help groups that want their own RepRap get off the ground by printing off the plastic parts needed to build your own.
Because one of the really exciting things about the RepRap is that it can make its own parts, or at least it can make the plastic ones – you can’t yet print circuit boards or metal components – so once someone has one they can help to spread the technology. Just as the easy availability of powerful computers, large hard drives and fast networks has exposed the inadequacies of copyright laws designed in an age when infringement required a printing press or a CD-burning factory, 3-D printing will soon come up against laws made in a world of factories and machine tools, and the battle is likely to be even more intense than that over music and films. Fortunately for those of us who believe in open data and an open society the intellectual ground for a remodelling of old forms of regulation is already being prepared by the Open Knowledge Foundation and others, so I’m slightly optimistic that we won’t be arguing about the provisions of the ‘DigitalModelling Bill’ in ten years time. Bill’s Links RepRap: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Ben O’Steen’s talk: http://benosteen.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/making-the-physical-from-the-digital/
Get your own RepRap plan:
The Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/
Open Knowledge Foundation: http://www.okfn.org/
Open Shakespeare: http://www.openshakespeare.org/
Bruce Sterling: Kiosk http://www.wattpad.com/75756-Kiosk-by-Bruce-Sterling
Cory Doctorow: Makers http://craphound.com/makers/download/
[This is also on the BBC News website, athttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10089419.stm ] Imagine a school where a student could sketch out an idea for new design of bicycle and not only draw it in 3-D using a computer-aided design package but actually create a scale-model and test it out, using inexpensive materials and a special printer that they can build themselves in the classroom. That’s the vision put forward by Ben O’Steen, a software engineer with a social conscience who is thinking about the implications of a world where 3-D printers are no longer just expensive prototyping systems for large companies but have fallen into the hands of the masses. He has been inspired by the RepRap, a desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic parts by extruding a heated thermoplastic polymer under computer control, which then sets as it cools and makes a usable object. The RepRap project was started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, who teaches mechanical engineering at Bath University. The schematics and all aspects are freely licensed for anyone to implement or adapt, and the current version, called ‘Mendel’, can be built for around £350. It makes objects from a cheap plastic made from corn starch, so is well within school budgets. The project has inspired thousands of people around the world, with websites dedicated to helping people make their own RepRap and get it working, and online schematics for objects from coathangers to working whistles to models of Gothic cathedrals – that one is available at a website called the ‘Thingiverse’ Although I’d come across the RepRap before it had always been an abstract idea, but seeing Ben talk with such enthusiasm about its potential in education and elsewhere brought home its transformative potential, and made me realise that the future has already arrived, even if it is not yet widely distributed.
And while a technology that offers people the ability to manufacture complex objects at home or in the office is enormously disruptive, we can at least see this one coming. Some writers of speculative fiction have already started engaging with it, including Bruce Sterling, in his lovely short story ‘Kiosk’, and Cory Doctorow, whose novel ‘Makers’ offers us an imagined world of printed objects and an emergent culture of 3-D makers who directly challenge many of the core assumptions of industrial society. I heard Ben speak about the RepRap at a recent conference organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation, along with many other programmers, scholars and activists committed to making all kinds of information available to be freely used, reused, and redistributed, from ‘sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata’ as their website puts it.
His talk was the highlight of the day for me, partly because he had brought a collection of props with him but also because his focus on real-world objects bridged the gap between the sometimes dry discussion of open databases and LinkedData and the day-to-day experiences of the vast majority of people whose lives don’t revolve around technology. As with so many advocates of free and open source solsutions, Ben and his friends are also planning to turn engagement into action by offering to help groups that want their own RepRap get off the ground by printing off the plastic parts needed to build your own.
Because one of the really exciting things about the RepRap is that it can make its own parts, or at least it can make the plastic ones – you can’t yet print circuit boards or metal components – so once someone has one they can help to spread the technology. Just as the easy availability of powerful computers, large hard drives and fast networks has exposed the inadequacies of copyright laws designed in an age when infringement required a printing press or a CD-burning factory, 3-D printing will soon come up against laws made in a world of factories and machine tools, and the battle is likely to be even more intense than that over music and films. Fortunately for those of us who believe in open data and an open society the intellectual ground for a remodelling of old forms of regulation is already being prepared by the Open Knowledge Foundation and others, so I’m slightly optimistic that we won’t be arguing about the provisions of the ‘DigitalModelling Bill’ in ten years time. Bill’s Links RepRap: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Ben O’Steen’s talk: http://benosteen.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/making-the-physical-from-the-digital/
Get your own RepRap plan:
The Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/
Open Knowledge Foundation: http://www.okfn.org/
Open Shakespeare: http://www.openshakespeare.org/
Bruce Sterling: Kiosk http://www.wattpad.com/75756-Kiosk-by-Bruce-Sterling
Cory Doctorow: Makers http://craphound.com/makers/download/
Facebook Privacy Disaster. Not.
In a shocking development Facebook has yet again stripped away the last veil of privacy from its hundreds of millions of users by exposing their interest in controversial topics, religious affiliation and vampire tendencies to the scrutiny of marketers, potential employers and anyone else who cares to take an interest.
That, at least, would be the impression anyone gained on reading the recent press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information‘ [see http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduces-control-over-personal-information], which says that Facebook has ‘removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, ‘including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly’, and goes on to note that ‘if you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them’.
The release complains that this will expose all sorts of information, and worries that turning the list of interests entered in a profile into separate pages with which users are associated will ‘create public lists for controversial issues, such as an interest in abortion rights, gay marriage, marijuana, tea parties and so on.’
Leaving aside the assumption that nobody would want to be publicly associated with a controversial topic, because apparently confessing to political interests is as embarrassing as talking about how you like to squeeze spots onto a mirror, the major problem with the EFF piece is that it completely overstates what Facebook is doing and presents it in the worst possible light.
Go to the Facebook release announcing the change at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=382978412130 and it says quite clearly that the new service is opt-in from the start and that you can disable either the entire feature or just choose which ‘connections’ you want to be part of:
Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you’ll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you’d previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking “Link All to My Profile”—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to “Choose Pages Individually” and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you’d previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the “Bio” section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.
Yes, this service will be useful to marketers and those trying to advertise, but it might also be useful for those of us with interests in obscure topics as it could help us hook up with the dozen other people around the world who really care about the ongoing career of former Clash drummer Terry Chimes. Yes, it changes the way Profiles work and will force people to present their data in a different way, moving some information from the interests section to the bio section. But whatever it is, it is not a privacy disaster and does not merit the scare-mongering headline on the EFF pronouncement.
The danger of this sort of overstatement is that it makes it much harder to draw attention to the real mistakes, like the default settings for Google Buzz when it launched, or Facebook’s Beacon advertising programme. Arguing that the sky is falling in every time there’s a new service or a change to privacy options doesn’t help at all, and the EFF and other campaigning organisations should realise this. Getting people to care about how these services offer and appreciate the importance of default settings and how what danah boyd calls ‘personally embarrassing information’ can be exposed is a long and slow process, and it is undermined by this sort of misleading over-reaction. Much as I admire EFF and their work, this was sloppy and needs to be fixed.
Power to the People
[This is also on the BBC News website at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8618290.stm] With the Digital Economy Act now law, a digital election taking place
around us, and more media coverage of Apple’s latest shiny electronic
toy than anyone could read in a lifetime the sense that the world
belongs to the wired can sometimes seem overwhelming. One aspect of this digital triumphalism is a disturbing tendency on
the part of the technologically privileged, a group of which I am
clearly a member, to express incomprehension as to why anyone might
choose not to be online, not to have home broadband, not to set up a
Facebook profile or reveal their whereabouts through Rummble and not
to tweet incessantly about their desire for the latest laptop, tablet
or smartphone. The reason may be that, as with any elite group, membership has its
privileges but exacts a price. For the Inner Party in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four it was the ability to acknowledge that the proles
mattered, while we seem to have lost the ability to “decentre” and see
the world from the viewpoint of another. The term was coined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget to
describe something that most of us manage to achieve in early
childhood but evidently lose as soon as we get a smartphone with an
unlimited data plan, at which point we start seeing those who choose
not to go online as ‘digital refuseniks’ I’m not talking here about those who cannot get online either because
they lack the resources or they live in areas of limited connectivity.
Many groups and organisations are working hard to get them connected,
and they do a great job in difficult circumstances. People like Helen Milner, the dedicated and effective managing
director of the , recently-appointed UK Digital Champion Martha Lane
Fox, Gail Bradbrook at Citizens Online and Gill Adams at Digital
Unite, which specialises in helping people over 50 use IT and
organises Silver Surfer Day each year, are motivated, competent and
effective, and we should all do what we can to support them. But there are others who could evidently afford a computer and an
internet connection yet choose not to take advantage of the
opportunity to sign up and surf the web, and we should not neglect
them. If, as I do, you believe in the benefits to society and to the
individual that come from being able to use online services and tools
with confidence then making people aware of these benefits and
changing their mind about what the internet has to offer is as much a
part of the wider campaign for social justice as ensuring that
everyone who is entitled to state benefits receives them in full. And unless we can persuade them that it is worth going online we will
all suffer, simply because real social change will only come about
when everyone has access and everyone can use online services and
tools. Part of the problem is that “selling” the internet to people who don’t
perceive their lives as lacking requires them to imagine themselves
doing things which seem either trivial, boring or simply unnecessary,
but this is an issue that has faced many technologies throughout the
ages. There is a wonderful parody of a monk having to be taught how to use a
“book” from the Norwegian TV show “Øystein og jeg” in 2001 that is now
all over YouTube. BoingBoing, the group blog that bills itself as a
“directory of wonderful things”, recently featured a pamphlet
published in 1916 by the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company
that tried to explain why it was worth having an electric supply to
your house. Home electricity was a hard thing to sell because people used to gas
lighting and the domestic equipment of the time simply could not
imagine what electricity might be used for. As a result the focus is
on the transformative power of the electric light, because it is easy
to describe and easy to illustrate. Of course the power cable that allows you to have light also lets you
do many other things, and a hundred years later we can easily imagine
electric versions of most devices, from toothbrushes to air
conditioning, but those trying to sell electricity at the time faced a
significant challenge. A lot of the effort being made to promote the internet today relies on
a similar strategy, focusing on the educational value of the net or
the ability to have video chats with your grandchildren. It’s
understandable, but clearly ineffective for a small but significant
proportion of the population. Unlike 1916 when even the people selling electricity had no clear idea
of how it might be used in the future we can tell much about the shape
of the information society. And we need to start talking about it in
ways that emphasise the ability of the network-connected computers to
improve our lives, help us build a sustainable economy that will not
make the biosphere inhospitable and provide education, healthcare and
a sense of community for all. I am not blindly optimistic about technology, and I do not think that
these benefits will come about simply because we all get online, but I
do firmly believe that the internet is one of the best tools on offer
to create a better world, and that we need to work harder to get this
point across to those who see Facebook being bullied into adding a
“panic” button to its website and believe that this is all the network
can give us.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8618290.stm] With the Digital Economy Act now law, a digital election taking place
around us, and more media coverage of Apple’s latest shiny electronic
toy than anyone could read in a lifetime the sense that the world
belongs to the wired can sometimes seem overwhelming. One aspect of this digital triumphalism is a disturbing tendency on
the part of the technologically privileged, a group of which I am
clearly a member, to express incomprehension as to why anyone might
choose not to be online, not to have home broadband, not to set up a
Facebook profile or reveal their whereabouts through Rummble and not
to tweet incessantly about their desire for the latest laptop, tablet
or smartphone. The reason may be that, as with any elite group, membership has its
privileges but exacts a price. For the Inner Party in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four it was the ability to acknowledge that the proles
mattered, while we seem to have lost the ability to “decentre” and see
the world from the viewpoint of another. The term was coined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget to
describe something that most of us manage to achieve in early
childhood but evidently lose as soon as we get a smartphone with an
unlimited data plan, at which point we start seeing those who choose
not to go online as ‘digital refuseniks’ I’m not talking here about those who cannot get online either because
they lack the resources or they live in areas of limited connectivity.
Many groups and organisations are working hard to get them connected,
and they do a great job in difficult circumstances. People like Helen Milner, the dedicated and effective managing
director of the , recently-appointed UK Digital Champion Martha Lane
Fox, Gail Bradbrook at Citizens Online and Gill Adams at Digital
Unite, which specialises in helping people over 50 use IT and
organises Silver Surfer Day each year, are motivated, competent and
effective, and we should all do what we can to support them. But there are others who could evidently afford a computer and an
internet connection yet choose not to take advantage of the
opportunity to sign up and surf the web, and we should not neglect
them. If, as I do, you believe in the benefits to society and to the
individual that come from being able to use online services and tools
with confidence then making people aware of these benefits and
changing their mind about what the internet has to offer is as much a
part of the wider campaign for social justice as ensuring that
everyone who is entitled to state benefits receives them in full. And unless we can persuade them that it is worth going online we will
all suffer, simply because real social change will only come about
when everyone has access and everyone can use online services and
tools. Part of the problem is that “selling” the internet to people who don’t
perceive their lives as lacking requires them to imagine themselves
doing things which seem either trivial, boring or simply unnecessary,
but this is an issue that has faced many technologies throughout the
ages. There is a wonderful parody of a monk having to be taught how to use a
“book” from the Norwegian TV show “Øystein og jeg” in 2001 that is now
all over YouTube. BoingBoing, the group blog that bills itself as a
“directory of wonderful things”, recently featured a pamphlet
published in 1916 by the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company
that tried to explain why it was worth having an electric supply to
your house. Home electricity was a hard thing to sell because people used to gas
lighting and the domestic equipment of the time simply could not
imagine what electricity might be used for. As a result the focus is
on the transformative power of the electric light, because it is easy
to describe and easy to illustrate. Of course the power cable that allows you to have light also lets you
do many other things, and a hundred years later we can easily imagine
electric versions of most devices, from toothbrushes to air
conditioning, but those trying to sell electricity at the time faced a
significant challenge. A lot of the effort being made to promote the internet today relies on
a similar strategy, focusing on the educational value of the net or
the ability to have video chats with your grandchildren. It’s
understandable, but clearly ineffective for a small but significant
proportion of the population. Unlike 1916 when even the people selling electricity had no clear idea
of how it might be used in the future we can tell much about the shape
of the information society. And we need to start talking about it in
ways that emphasise the ability of the network-connected computers to
improve our lives, help us build a sustainable economy that will not
make the biosphere inhospitable and provide education, healthcare and
a sense of community for all. I am not blindly optimistic about technology, and I do not think that
these benefits will come about simply because we all get online, but I
do firmly believe that the internet is one of the best tools on offer
to create a better world, and that we need to work harder to get this
point across to those who see Facebook being bullied into adding a
“panic” button to its website and believe that this is all the network
can give us.