Venture Lab

Week 1: Discussion on Utopias and Dystopias The World’s Most Powerful Digital Camera Snaps Its First Photos On a mountaintop in Chile is the most powerful digital camera mankind has ever constructed. Called the Dark Energy Camera, the phone booth-sized device shoots 570-megapixel photographs using an array of 62 separate CCD sensors and a 13-foot light-gathering mirror. Planning and building the thing took 120 scientists from 23 international organizations a whopping 8 years. This past week, the researchers behind the project announced the first fruits of their labor: massive photographs that show patches of the sky 20 times the size of the moon (as seen from Earth). The photographs are so big and so sensitive that each one shows over 100,000 separate galaxies that are up to 8 billion light years away. Over the next five years, scientists plan to create these massive color photos of 1/8th of the night sky, capturing 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters, and even 4,000 supernovae. A glimpse into the heart of this massive camera that shows its 62 CCD sensors (via Phys.Org)

Transhumanist Declaration Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects.

The Evolution Of School Supplies School has been around for a couple thousand years, give or take, and thus, in some form or another, so has an incarnation of what we now call the “Back to School season”. Now, students and their parents flock to stores with credit cards at the ready, prepared to purchase all the trimmings of a successful school year. Carts are filled with new clothes, sneakers, notebooks, pens and pencils, and other accoutrements. As they purchase these items for their kids, many parents reflect what was different when they were returning to school as children. Many note all of the new technologies the students currently have access to, like laptops , iPads , and smartphones . But what about the rest of it? Take a look at this handy infographic from Red Leaf Loans and see how our school supplies have evolved over time.

EDCMOOC: Utopias and Dystopias Film Festival I signed up some time ago to do the Coursera online course E-Learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc). I am going to blog some of my thoughts on the course over the next five weeks, starting with week one’s film festival about Utopias and Dystopias. Bendito Machine III Bendito Machine III shows quite a dystopian vision. Ecological Implications New technologies make older technologies obsolete leading to more throw away artifacts and creating landfill with all the flow on effects that carries with it. Social Implications Individuals are putting their obsession with technology ahead of relationships, allowing technology to set cultural expectations and agendas. I adore this tweet from Edel Horan: Bendito Machine reminiscent of public fervor over new Apple products! I feel the pressure to be an early adopter of technology but there are financial and time investments relating to new technology. Inbox Inbox looks at the limitations and advantages of online communications. Thursday Agency New Media

10 Educational Facts You Probably Don't Know It’s the weekend. That means it’s time to relax, unwind, and learn something. In that vein, I thought it might be fun to recap one of my favorite posts of all time from Buzzfeed. What follows are 10 factoids that I didn’t know but feel a teensy bit smarter for now knowing. The “YKK” on your zipper stands for “Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikigaisha:” 3.14 is PIE backwards: Cashews grow like this: Pineapples grow like this: Here’s what velcro looks like close up: Here’s what chalk looks like under a microscope: Here’s what sand looks like under a microscope: A Blue Whale’s heart is so big, a small child can swim through the veins: There’s enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in one foot of water:

EDC MOOC Taming digital traces for informal learning dhaval Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. Also see:

10 Emerging Education and Instructional Technologies that all Educators Should Know About (2012) Naturally, as author of EmergingEdTech, I’m always keeping an eye out for education and instructional technologies that are emerging from the seemingly endless array of tools and concepts that are out there – which applications and ideas are rising to the fore and best positioned to enhance engagement and impact learning? This year I’ve also been working with constituents at The College of Westchester to develop a Strategic Technology Plan for the next 3 years, so it’s never been more important for me to be aware of those impactful education technologies and concepts that are on the horizon or are already in use and pulling ahead of the pack. Since this listing is more pointedly focused on emerging technologies and looking out over the next few years than the list I published at this time last year, it should not come as a surprise that there are a lot of new entries here (edging out six technologies that remain prevalent and potent, but are more ‘established’ than ’emerging’).

H-: Wrestling with Transhumanism Transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In How We Became Posthuman,1 I identified an undergirding assumption that makes possible such predictions as Hans Moravec’s transhumanist fantasy that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information. There are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. How can we extract the valuable questions transhumanism confronts without accepting all the implications of transhumanist claims? As a literary scholar, I consider the locus classicus for re-framing transhumanist questions to be science fiction and speculative fiction, jointly signified by SF.

Nature is a crackjack: Artistical field landscapes digg Sharedigg As you know Nature is a best designer and creator. It supplies us with inspiration throughout the World in every tiny corner. Certainly, not everyone can see all facets of its beauty and do justice to. But those who have an opportunity to stop by and enjoy all the delights of Mother Nature even simple planted fields will occur to be masterpieces. Today, I have collected 25 examples of artistic field landscapes. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.