IdeaFestival

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

Curry Stone global Design Prize makes IdeaFestival home

The Curry Stone Foundation, which funds activities to support healthy communities and public health, has announced the establishment of the Curry Stone Design Prize for “…exceptional emerging designers with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity.... Public health is best achieved when all people have access to shelter, health care, clean air, clean water, clean food, education and live in a time of peace," according to a news release accompanying news of the financial gift to the University of Kentucky.

This $100,000 design prize will be presented annually at the IdeaFestival beginning this year.

Developed in partnership with the University of Kentucky, College of Design, the prize is being supported through the foundation established by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone of Oregon. 

IF is excited about the establishment of the Curry Stone Prize and the opportunity it presents to greatly expand the design content of the festival, which has hosted such design luminaries as Cameron Sinclair and Adriaan Gueze. More here.

Kris

Homaro Cantu - IF Conversations

Homaro Cantu, Chicago-based chef, inventor, entrepreneur and leader in "molecular gastronomy" certainly brings a non-conventional perspective to food. Where else might a menu tasting consist of actually tasting the menu?

As always, these brief conversations may be found on IFTV at YouTube.

Wayne

Design elasticity and less stuff

I enjoy creative descriptions of how the mind copes with change, recently writing, for example, about the  opposable business mind. And even more recently, I've linked a couple of times to an installation called Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art.

If you believe that designers are merely glorified decorators, Paola Antonelli would like a moment of your time to challenge that assumption. In a recent SEED essay, she argues that design and designers, for example, play a large role in simply making change manageable:

Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of human intelligence, but today's instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity. The by-product of adaptability and acceleration, elasticity means being able to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one's own rhythms and goals. It means being able to embrace progress, understanding how to make it our own. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change (my emphasis, above).

She further links elasticity to the need to bring the monuments produced by scientific discovery to a human scale, and how science and design are engaged in unprecedented cooperation.

If you're at all interested in how modern fast-paced and beery-eyed change can be made more understandable - and how it is being made more understandable - I encourage you to read the essay.

Much to my delight, Antonelli also suggests that coping-with-change can play a role in a kind of conservation:

[E]ven as technology offers us more and more options, many agree that we in fact require fewer—not more—objects in our lives.

Here, here. That's a design challenge I can embrace.

Wayne

I'll be 15 minutes late

How late will you really be? According to Freakonomics, if you like Farecast, which predicts whether fares to certain cities will go up or down, you might also like Delaycast, which, applying some deft math, will predict how late you are likely to arrive.

Wayne

I guess I'm a robot sympathizer

I'm not sure how I ran across this robot video, but it's wildly popular. My feed reader pulled down Jamais Cascio's reaction to it today, and because his reaction and mine were similar I thought I'd sign on to the sentiment he expresses.

Initially, I was weirded out. Looking like a cross between a giant fly and a horse, there's no question that this robot is exceptionally life like. I know that biped robots with human-like gaits are also being built. Perhaps that's one reason why I've changed my mind about the possibility of artificial intelligence. Intelligent robots increasingly pass the look test.

But seeing the person accompanying the robot kick it hard in the side - curiously, the scene is replayed in slow motion - I was suddenly aware of another emotion.

I felt genuinely sorry for it as it briefly flailed about trying to regain its footing.

Watching the video a couple of times again, I was reminded of how we're attracted to things with minds, how the sound of a parent's voice can light up an infant's eyes - how the cooing of a lover can bring union - how the sight of someone in distress can catalyze an emotion buried in our limbs. This is good.

Thus cued, we reach out.

I realize that it's a robot, but I'm with Jamais. Why the hard knock?

Wayne

"Humanitarian Technology Review"

Bruno Giussani has posted an article about a new journal with an intriguing title: The Humanitarian Technology Review. A project of InSTEDD, the journalist effort is based on the idea that many of the worst results from disease and disaster can be traced to an inadequate understanding of events between specialties.

Bruno cites the early reporting of West Nile Virus among large mammals in veterinary journals; that information might have helpful to medical doctors had the information been made available to them. He also lists this impressive list of fields the journal will cover:

early disease detection, predictive modeling and simulation, mobile communications, transportation, water and sanitation, green tech, climate change impacts, machine translation, vaccines, crisis management, food security, resilience and recovery, energy, chronic disease, microbiology, just to mention a few.

The goal of InSTEDD, according to Bruno, is to provide "the earliest possible warning of all bad things."

Wayne

Enceladus' internal heat mapped

[Cross posted from KySat, the blog for the Kentucky space program] More science from Cassini's recent close encounter with Saturn's geyser-moon, Enceladus, is being made available to the public. NASA has just posted this heat map of the  southern pole of the satellite.

According to the agency, there is a 200 degree swing (Fahrenheit) between the temperature at the vents and the rest of the surface of the moon.

To see what the water-ice geysers look like from space, check out this picture.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SwRI/SSI

Titan chemistry, titanic idea

CICLOPS, the team that brings the fantastic Cassini images to the public, has just published this natural color panorama. The yellowish Titan is headed behind the planet, while Tethys has come into view.

Cassini is scheduled to fly by Titan at a mere 620 miles in altitude today to further examine the atmosphere of the moon.

In 2005, the doughty spacecraft also sent a probe to land on the surface of methane-shrouded Titan, which, recent evidence suggests, may also contain subsurface oceans.

And in an unexpected surprise, the craft has observed continuously erupting water-ice geysers at the southern pole of Enceladus.

So why is that important?

If these active organic and geological processes are occurring here, in a one solar system in single galaxy - and the one we just happen to occupy to boot - perhaps they are more common than previously believed. Thanks to Hubble, we now know, for example, that organic molecules are present in the atmosphere of another planet orbiting a distant sun. Perhaps, just perhaps, a history-changing discovery awaits.

NASA has made the science from Cassini freely available here if you're interested.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Wayne