aaronsw Jasmina Tesanovic at 3:35 am Tue, Apr 1, 2014 • 3 Recently I saw a movie on the life and death of Aaron Swartz, who is nowadays often called a martyr for the freedom of the Internet. People, nations and governments like martyrs. They love them, they need them. Martyrs are part of our bipolar, black and white society constructed from good and bad guys, who always do good and bad deeds. Read the rest Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Wed, Mar 26, 2014 • 2 Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland -- Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. Here is Noah's reading (MP3), released as a CC0 file that you can share without any restrictions. Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Tue, Jan 28, 2014 • 1 Susan writes, "Over 22K game developers from all over the world (72 countries) came together this past weekend (January 24-26) at the annual Global Game Jam (GGJ).
Robots on the rise in the workplace Technology has always been one of the great drivers of the U.S. economy, constantly creating jobs and eliminating some in the process. But recently, MIT professors tell Steve Kroft, technology has been eliminating more jobs than it creates -- a net loss that poses a danger to the delicate economic recovery. Kroft's report on this technological revolution, often characterized by advanced robotics, will be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. "Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs. Fewer Americans on a percentage basis are holding jobs now than 20 years ago. The irony is that the economy is growing. One reason for this was automated warehouses, which surprised McAfee. Kroft visits a huge warehouse in Devens, Mass., where about 100 employees work with 69 suitcase-size robots that navigate the massive facility, moving product from shelf to shipping point faster and better than humanly possible.
HADOPI, ACTA, Digital Economy Bill: From Human Rights to Economic Rights There is increasing debate and discussion about regulatory moves in the internet sphere that have direct implications for the kind of society we want to live in and the rights we can expect to have: freedom of speech balanced against rights to privacy; centralized data gathering and storage by governments versus rights to control over personal information; rights to protection of intellectual property balanced against rights of fair use; rights to freely communicate versus protecting, for example, minors from abuses such as child pornography; and the emerging recognition of the need to break down the digital divide with a right of access to the world wide web through universal broadband access. I have been arguing for some time that there are natural balances to be struck between these rights and proposed regulatory measures, whilst well-intended, aren't addressing them satisfactorily. France invented the graduated response with HADOPI; What does that mean exactly? Why is Privacy at risk?
Elon Musk's Mission to Mars | Wired Science Maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk Photo: Art Streiber When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars—sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific—you need to find another diagnosis. That’s the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. I have never met an entrepreneur who fits this model more than Elon Musk. And he is leading the private space race with SpaceX, which is poised to replace the space shuttle and usher us into an interplanetary age. Elon Musk: That’s true.
The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” « Unhandled Exception I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron’s family during what must be the hardest time of their lives. If the good that men do is oft interred with their bones, so be it, but in the meantime I feel a responsibility to correct some of the erroneous information being posted as comments to otherwise informative discussions at Reddit, Hacker News and Boing Boing. Apparently some people feel the need to self-aggrandize by opining on the guilt of the recently departed, and I wanted to take this chance to speak on behalf of a man who can no longer defend himself. I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. The facts: Like this:
A Rare Mix Created Silicon Valley's Startup Culture Courtesy of Intel The first in a 3-part series airing this week on Morning Edition. When Facebook goes public later this spring, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, will be following in the footsteps of a long line of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs that includes Steve Jobs and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But there was a time when the idea of an engineer or scientist starting his or her own company was rare. In 1956, what is now called Silicon Valley was called the Valley of the Heart's Delight. Its rolling hills were covered with farms and orchards. Collecting Scientific Talent William Shockley was certainly brilliant, says Leslie Berlin, a historian and archivist at Stanford University. "People tend to collectively agree," she says, that "[Shockley] was one of the smartest people to walk about this valley for quite a long time." In 1956, Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. "He'd grown up in Palo Alto," Berlin says. An Entrepreneurial Spirit Cindy Carpien/NPR
Lessig Blog, v2 Bump On The Road For Driverless Cars Isn't Technology, It's You : All Tech Considered hide captionCar companies are picking up automobile concepts such as this Lexus SL 600 Integrated Safety driverless research vehicle, shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January in Las Vegas. Julie Jacobson/AP Car companies are picking up automobile concepts such as this Lexus SL 600 Integrated Safety driverless research vehicle, shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January in Las Vegas. When you watch science fiction movies, you notice there are two things that seem like we will get in the future — a silver jumpsuit and driverless cars. In the movie I, Robot, which is set in a futuristic 2035, Will Smith is sitting in the driver's seat of his Audi, relaxing and reading a magazine when he suddenly gets attacked by robots. Jumping On The Band Wagon Filip Brabec with Audi of America says the car company is still a couple of decades away from the film's depiction of technology, however, the car maker is navigating toward a new initiative. YouTube Well, we are.
Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist Yesterday Aaron Swartz, a close friend and collaborator of ours, committed suicide. This is a tragic end to a brief and extraordinary life. Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. Other projects Aaron worked on included the RSS specifications, web.py, tor2web, the Open Library, and the Chrome port of HTTPS Everywhere. Aaron's eloquent brilliance was mixed with a complicated introversion. For a long time, Aaron was more comfortable reading books than talking to humans (he once told me something like, "even talking to very smart people is hard, but if I just sit down and read their books, I get their most considered and insightful thoughts condensed in a beautiful and efficient form. Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes.
No Mercy For Robots: Experiment Tests How Humans Relate To Machines : Shots - Health News hide captionCould you say "no" to this face? Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand recently tested whether humans could end the life of a robot as it pleaded for survival. Christoph Bartneck Could you say "no" to this face? In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study. In Milgram's study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer "learner" in another room. As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the "learners" began to clearly suffer. Bartneck studies human-robot relations, and he wanted to know what would happen if a robot in a similar position to the "learner" begged for its life. Treating Machines Like Social Beings Consider the work of Stanford professor Clifford Nass. YouTube The Implications
Internet activist Aaron Swartz dead at 26 - Americas Internet activist Aaron Swartz who had been arrested and faced federal criminal charges over allegations of fraud case has committed suicide at his New York City home at age 26, authorities have said. . Swartz hanged himself on Friday weeks before he was set to start trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available. Swartz is widely credited with being a co-author of the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0, which he worked on at age 14, according to a blog post on Saturday from his friend, science fiction author Cory Doctorow. Over the years, he became an online icon for helping to make information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documents from the PACER case-law system. In 2008, The New York Times reported, Swartz wrote a program to legally download the files using free access via public libraries. "Information is power. 'No sense'
Singularity Q&A Originally published in 2005 with the launch of The Singularity Is Near. Questions and Answers So what is the Singularity? Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. And that’s the Singularity? No, that’s just the precursor. When will that occur? I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. Why is this called the Singularity? Indeed. Absolutely.
Le racket de l'édition scientifique Le quotidien Libération a aimablement publié hier, vendredi 14 octobre (p. 22), sous le titre « les rapaces de l'édition scientifique » une tribune où je déplorais l'exploitation des institutions de recherche et, partant, du contribuable, par les grands éditeurs commerciaux de revues scientifiques. Cela fait déjà un certain nombre d'années que je m'intéresse aux questions de droit d'auteur ainsi qu'à l'accès des scientifiques, mais aussi du public, aux publications scientifiques. Dès les débuts de mon activité de recherche et de publication, j'ai été quelque peu surpris que les éditeurs me demandent de renoncer, par document signé, à presque tous mes droits sur mes articles, au point même que si j'avais suivi rigoureusement ce qui m'était imposé, je n'aurais pu mettre mes propres articles sur mon propre site Web professionnel. Je me demandais, en effet, où partait l'argent des abonnements. Le monde de la recherche pouvait-il réagir ? Enfin, reste le problème de l'accès aux archives.
Better Than Human | Gadget Lab Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. And it has already begun. Click to Open Overlay Gallery Here’s why we’re at the inflection point: Machines are acquiring smarts. We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink Robotics. 1.