Archive for September, 2010

MakerBot and the Rise of Libertarian Tech

Imagine instead of going to the store, simply downloading what you need from the Internet and printing it out on a 3D printer. That future is here.

"The time from a thought to a thing is short. You can just manifest something," explains MakerBot Industries co-founder Bre Pettis of a world for those with one of the stuff printers he helped create. There is much to be MakerBotted: practical stuff (a cup, a cooling fan), replacement stuff (a camera lense cover, a shower curtain hook), novel stuff (a tube squeezer, a clip-on reading LED) and the completely random (a miniature of your own head). We visit the Brooklyn (NY) wherehouse of MakerBot Industries where Bre Pettis shows us a future where we all can be our own manufacturers.

Visualizing Pressible: Blog Clusters & Growth of a System

Pressible is an online publishing platform developed at Edlab - a research group at Teachers College at Columbia University.

It’s a relatively new system (launched formally in June) and has a base of about 110 individual blogs.

I’m interested in visualizing the Pressible ‘ecosystem’ - and wanted to see in a time-based way how the system as a whole has developed. Using Processing, I created this animation, which shows the system grow over the span of about a year.

Each individual ‘cluster’ is a blog in the Pressible system. The coloured dots around the clusters are unique posts, which appear in ‘real time’ as the calendar reaches the day on which they were published.

This animation was built using Processing v.1.2, which is available for free fromAprocessing.org

.:blog.blprnt.com->

Real Onionz: Steve Jobs Isn’t a Ninja?

.:macnn.com->

Open Source Cell Phone Network

In the developing world, cell phones come before land lines. Why? Because installing cell towers is cheaper than running landlines. But even lower cell phone costs turn telecom companies away from the poorest and hardest-to-reach areas. Where they do provide coverage, it’s expensive, especially for the 3 billion people in the world who earn about $3 per day.

A small team of telecom industry veterans has solved both of those problems. The team developedAOpenBTS, an open-source, software-based cellphone network. Not only does it cost one-tenth as much as traditional networks, but carriers could charge callers about $2 per month and still make a profit.

To do that, OpenBTS has stripped some of the opacity from cellphone service, turning it into a do-it-yourself project. Now, anyone with some technical chops, a Radio Shack nearby, and $4,500 can make a network that works with a standard GSM cellphone. In sum, this project could change how most of the world communicates.

.:engineeringforchange.info->

Can anybody confirm whether Peyton cried on opening day? My Ninjas, Please.

Evolution is About Divergence

Evolution has always been about divergence. More variety, more specialisation, more ugliness, and more beauty.

.:scrivle.com->

The Decade of the Developer

The majorAproductivity gains of late 1990s and early 2000s were powered by the spread of information technology throughout organizations of all sizes. And it made IT professionals invaluable. However, the technology world remains in the midst of a relentless transformation and the changes sweeping the industry over the next decade will make developers, not IT pros, the new superstars.

We shouldn't forget that the innovations we now take for granted have streamlined business communications and commerce in big way. I'm talking about PCs on every desk, computer networks for file and printer sharing, email, shared calendars, and ultimately the Web . These innovations gave a turbo boost to existing companies and spawned the rise of nimble new companies that were able to run circles around the incumbents in many industries.

These 1990s innovations made nearly all organizations deeply dependent on new technologies and they hired IT professionals in droves in order to troubleshoot problems, train employees how to use the new digital tools, and to "keep the world running," as it were.

But that revolution is over. The technologies are deployed. The users are trained. The data centers are built. In recent years, no new IT innovations have arisen that can transform businesses the way corporate networks or email groupware or the Web did a decade ago. Nearly everything IT is doing now is tweaking and incremental upgrades to existing technologies.

.:blogs.techrepublic.com->

FarmVille vs. Real Farms

.:compuccino.com->

Revalorizing the Trades

For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, they asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why? Camille Paglia writes…

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their handsaceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.

.:chronicle.com->