Some time in the 1960’s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world.

Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent.

This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots. [more]

• This is a small list of spatial ontologies I sniffed around the net:

• geo Ontologies at mindswap.
• RDF 2d geometry  NASA spatial ontologies
• spatial vocabulary from CYC
• spacenamespace

Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

[more]

Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. Please note the nice filter option and the rss export. Supa cool+

Nice post on Regine’s blog on using puppets to control appliances or specific interfaces. I see a trend recently of this kind:

– Office Voodoo, a my ex-colleague Michel Lew;

– Voodoo dolls controlled game;

– Teddy bear used as remote control.

I was astonish when I discovered that the USA military force published the report on the Calipari incident with lots of “omissis”. Here we are talking about the life of a Man that was lost by an accident / lack of coordination / maybe else ….

The least thing Italians expect is to have a report with missing parts. I feel treated as a moron by the States. But I am not, I hope. Fortunately, an italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, was able to remove the black stripes covering the text from the published PDF of the report. Now is possible to see the differences between the two versions.

@%!!!###

(via)

Se io ho un euro e tu hai un euro e ce li scambiamo, alla fine restiamo con un euro ciascuno. Ma se io ho un’idea e tu un’altra idea e ce le scambiamo, alla fine ci troveremo con due idee ciascuno!

If I have one euro and you have one as well, and if we exchange them, we will be with one euro each at the end. However, if I have one idea and you have one and we exchange them, then we will be with two at the end!

Beppe Grillo

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.

In the wilds of the San Jacinto Mountains, along a steep canyon, scientists are turning 30 acres of pines and hardwoods in California into a futuristic vision of environmental study. They are linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers, which are beginning to paint an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species. [more]

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.

GridLockd! is a large urban game where four teams compete to capture as many grid positions within a half hour on a city-based game board.

Loosely based on Othello, which is a two player game of tiles, these four teams must be the first to photograph as many unique semacodes placed in 36 city intersections.

This project is meant to display how semacodes, camera phones, ad-hoc groups, and social dynamics are effected under time pressure.