Archive for the ‘robots’ Category

The world is upon us.

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The world is upon us.

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Bothersome like a whimsical thought of what is apparent of achievement and what needs to get done. To think for a second that what you want is what we want is right. And to think of the later is too late and gone to be done just right. Let us bring flight to those that cannot fly and blind those that can already see.

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For in the long run it is us that stand in the way. It is us, the leaders that carry the torch from a land far away to enlighten and then frenzy an irreplaceable interconnectedness. The gates have opened. Signals and co-opted simplicity shed these lights and are only less manly than the comfortable tunnels of Winnipeg, Canadia. Moving on and progressing are the hardest of things, more dense then of the iron, brass, and cult copper that are forged together on a daily commotion.

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Let us bring flight to those that cannot fly and blind those that can already see. I’ll see you in station and we will have fun.

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thanks for Stanky Plank for sending this in

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MY NINJA PLEASE! 7.3.08 : WorldsNest :: Habitat Universe

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I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again. DO NOT SLEEP ::: via WorldsNest

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‘WALL-E,’ ‘Wanted’ make a $100 million duo

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LOS ANGELES | - A lonely little robot made millions of friends during the weekend — and even outgunned Angelina Jolie.

"WALL-E," the Pixar Animation tale of a robot toiling away on a long-abandoned Earth, debuted as the No. 1 movie with $62.5 million in ticket sales, with Jolie’s assassin thriller "Wanted" opening in second place with $51.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The two movies combined to keep Hollywood on a roll. The top 12 movies took in $179.2 million, up 22 percent from the same weekend last year, when Pixar’s "Ratouille" opened with $47 million.

It was the fifth straight weekend that revenues climbed. Revenues for the summer season that began May 2 are up 6 percent over last year’s record pace, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

The sour economy and high gas prices may be helping to fuel Hollywood’s boom, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers. Movies tend to thrive when times are tough because they are relatively cheap compared to sports events, concerts and other outings.

The previous weekend’s No. 1 movie, the Warner Bros. comedy "Get Smart," slipped to third place with $20 million, raising its total to $77.3 million.

"WALL-E" maintains the perfect track record of Pixar, the Walt Disney unit that has made nine films, all of them critical and commercial successes, including "Cars," "Monsters, Inc." and the "Toy Story" flicks. "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles" put up the biggest opening-weekend numbers among Pixar movies, both pulling in just over $70 million.

Set centuries in the future, "WALL-E" is the story of a rickety, walking trash compactor that humans left running after abandoning the over-polluted planet.

The movie overcame a dialogue challenge — the two main robot characters barely speak, beyond each other’s names — using wildly inventive visuals and sound effects to propel much of the story. mcall

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Posted: July 2nd, 2008
at 5:08am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: business,robots,film

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2057 The World - Documentary

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7582986795752940587

Well, sort of a documentary anyway.

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Posted: June 30th, 2008
at 9:20am by Black Ock


Categories: apple,robots,documentary

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Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech

VANCOUVER, British Columbia a€" A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The articlea€™s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

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Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Macleana€™s, Canadaa€™s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their a€oedignity, feelings and self-respect.a€A

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Macleana€™s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

a€oeIta€™s hate speech!a€A yelled one man.

a€oeIta€™s free speech!a€A yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions a€" even false, provocative or hateful things a€" without legal consequence.

The Macleana€™s article, a€oeThe Future Belongs to Islam,a€A was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called a€oeAmerica Alonea€A (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

a€oeIn much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at onea€™s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,a€A Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called a€oeThe Exceptional First Amendment.a€A

a€oeBut in the United States,a€A Professor Schauer continued, a€oeall such speech remains constitutionally protected.a€A

Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.

Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.

By contrast, American courts would not stop a planned march by the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.

Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps a€oebasically a Puerto Rican program.a€A The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase a€oethe general level of prejudice.a€A

Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.

a€oeIt is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,a€A Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, a€oewhen they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.a€A

Professor Waldron was reviewing a€oeFreedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendmenta€A by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.

But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections a€oein an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.a€A In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Courta€™s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.

The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article a€" or any publication a€" intended to stir up racial hatred surely does not.

Mr. Lewis wrote that there was a€oegenuinely dangerousa€A speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.

the remainder of this article can be found at nytimes

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The Ninja Gap

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David Weinberger somehow manages to find time to write books, write thoughtful blog posts, AND produce a periodic newsletter - Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization - thata€™s one of he best reads on the a€net. Ia€™m deeply flattered that the current issue features Davida€™s thoughts on some of the topics Ia€™m obsessed with: media attention, caring, international understanding. More generously, he gives me the chance to react to his essay within the essaya€¦

Davida€™s generosity isna€™t the main reason Ia€™m linking to his piece - ita€™s that hea€™s broken some important theoretical ground with his important new concept in media criticism: The Ninja Gap. It takes a moment or two to explain - bear with me.

Almost anyone whoa€™s heard me give a public talk has heard me observe that Japan and Nigeria have roughly the same populations, but vastly different media representation: youa€™re roughly 8-12 times more likely to find an article focused on Japan in an American newspaper than an article on Nigeria. There are a lot of possible explanations for this phenomenon, from racism to comparative economic power. David offers a new one: Japana€™s got ninjas, and Nigeria doesna€™t.

Ita€™s a brilliant observation because ita€™s funny, true and highly relevant to conversations about media attention. Johan Galtung, in his seminal a€oeThe Structure of Foreign Newsa€oe, draws a persuasive metaphor between a radio receivera€™s ability to tune in one of many radio stations, and a listenera€™s likelihood to a€oereceivea€A a piece of news:

F4: The more meaningful the signal, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.

F5: The more consonant the signal is with the mental image of what one expects to find, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.

F7: The more a signal has been tuned in to the more likely it will continue to be tuned in to as worth listening to.

Context matters, Galtung argues. If wea€™ve got a mental image of Africa as a backwards and technically retrograde place, wea€™re likely to miss stories about innovation in mobile commerce (see the lead story in issue 407a€¦) or success in venture capital. Galtunga€™s fifth maxim is closely linked to the idea of cognitive dissonance - ita€™s uncomfortable to attempt to resolve new information that conflicts with existing perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.

Context doesna€™t just come from hard news - we all consume far more entertainment and advertising content than we consume of hard news. This information helps shape our views of these countries, and likely helps us unconsciously decide what sort of information to accept or reject. These perceptions construct something over time that might be thought of as a a€oenation branda€A - as the man who coined that term,marketer Simon Anholt, observed, a€oeEthiopia is well branded to receive aid, but poorly branded as a tourism destination.a€A

In this context, Japan is a place branded in many of our minds as a place thata€™s innovative, high-tech, and more than a little strange. Whether or not wea€™ve been to Japan, wea€™ve encountered anime, monster movies, martial arts flicks, SONY tva€™s and Toyota trucks. Whether or not our ideas about Japan are well-founded, reflect the reality on the ground, are rich in stereotypes, etc., wea€™ve got preconceptions about Japan. On some level, the fact that we know that a€oeJapan = Ninjasa€A means that wea€™ve got receptivity for a story about Japan that we might not have for Nigeria.

And so, Nigeria needs ninja. Or as David explains:

One reason we care about Japan more than Nigeria (generally) is that Japan has a cool culture. Wea€™ve heard about that culture because some Westerners wrote bestselling books about ninjas, and then Hollywood made ninja movies. Love them ninjas! Nigeria undoubtedly has something as cool as ninjas. Ok, something almost as cool as ninjas. If we had some blockblusters about the Nigerian equivalent of ninjas, wea€™d start to be interested Nigeria.

In other words, wea€™re more inclined to pay attention to Japan because wea€™ve got some context - a weird, non-representative context, for sure - while we have almost no context for stories about Nigeria. The context we do have for Nigeria - 419 scams - tends to be pretty corrosive, and may make us likelier to pick up only the stories that portray Nigeria as wildly corrupt and criminal.

Davida€™s observation leads him to some concrete advice for those of us trying to inspire xenophilia: write better: a€oeGood writing can make anything interesting. We will read the story about the Nigerian peddler and his neighborhood if there is a writer able to tell that story in a compelling way.a€A

Thata€™s harder than it sounds. But ita€™s also one of the best pieces of constructive advice Ia€™ve seen on cultivating xenophilia: tell good stories in a compelling way. And it wouldna€™t hurt to throw a ninja or two in there while youa€™re at it.

This post originally ran on Ethan’s excellent personal blog, My Heart’s in Accra.

via worldchanging

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Nineteen Ninety-Now #5

Wow…

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You know you used to watch it.

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Posted: June 3rd, 2008
at 5:18am by Black Ock


Categories: youtube,robots,mnp is for the children

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MNP Geospatial : O’Reilly Where 2.0 2008 Conference

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Where to start and where to begin?

We would like to say happy trails to all of the attendees, speakers, and Brady Forrest, Conference Chair, for enabling a spectacular culmination of ideas and of course people.

I was happy to partake in most of the tutorials and listen amongst the speakers while experiencing the bounds of the various "heat" maps that were located throughout the conference quarters. Apparently by the end of the conference like-minds had been appointed none other than a grossly giddy quite title. [see the O’Reilly photo at the end of this leaf]

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In accordance with the final speaker of the assembly, Erik Hersman, it would be ignorant not to capstone anterior surprises: the activist mapping that was prevalent throughout caught the most of my attention. Eduardo Jezierski spoke passionately about the unique relationships of choice presented when definition arrives at the corner of life and death.

Are maps accessible enough for general consumption? George Demmy and TerraGo Technologies have solved this quandary by paralleling the PDF format with GIS.

MNP asks eight (8) questions concerning the future of the geospatial web

What kind of ramifications does the radius creep of related map stock pose for accurate data?

Are humans inherently familiar with maps?

How do people look for local information?

Are neighborhoods redundant or sequential in the quest to better understand city framework?

What is the proper form of a map?

How do we accurately report "data"?

What are movement signatures?

Which industries will be impacted the most by GIS?

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The most creative application of map wizardry? Bar none, Andrea Vaccari, team member of the NYTE project really pressed the steam for an instant boil of how paired maps are with the visual.

Chimp geniuses would have had fun with all of the possibilities that DIY drones set forth. That being said do NOT sleep on Light42.

How does this all relate to the real/city world approach to progressive geospatial understanding? According to the crowd theory of Paul Torrens, these value packages can only be evaluated within the boundaries of understanding the nuances of exception as well the opponents of acceptance.

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Who will rule the map world? A grand question that ESRI, Google Earth, and Virtual Earth would love to answer. If I was wearing the right hat, it would probably be a toss-up between the capabilities, the level of interaction, and the information….. until Where 2.0 2009!
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Posted: June 2nd, 2008
at 8:01am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: hood status,myninjaplease,computers,apple,web,cell phones,robots,weaponry,architecture,design,science,et cetera,diy,maps

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The pitch from ExcelAire

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Fly from Paris to a€¦ Ronkonkoma?

Charter flight company ExcelAire is making a pitch to swank European travelers to park their private jets at its hangar at Islipa€™s Long Island MacArthur Airport.

The reasons: Fuel is cheaper there, taxi time are as short as ever, takeoff delay is non-existent, and youa€™re right next to the Long Island Expressway for a quick drive to the city (depending on the time of day of course a€" aim for 4 a.m.).

From their commercial (press release) libizblog

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Posted: June 2nd, 2008
at 6:53am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: hood status,myninjaplease,bling,business,robots,gear,architecture

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