/patternHunter [/ph]

"Prominent Linux distributor Red Hat has revealed a new open source social networking service called Mugshot. Designed to facilitate integration of live social interactivity into the desktop computing experience, Mugshot emphasizes communication and entertainment. The new service, which is still largely under development and accessible by invitation only, currently enables users to chat, share links, and share information about their favorite music...

"Mugshot is Red Hat's first major incursion into social computing, but it seems like a natural extension of the company's work on MIT's $100 laptop project. The Sugar user interface system designed by Red Hat and the open source community for deployment on MIT's budget-friendly portables provides tightly-integrated support for communication and social interaction. Mugshot looks like a broader initiative intended to apply the same concepts to mainstream desktop computing by integrating a variety of independent services" /arstechica/

"EveR-1, a female android... built by Baeg Moon-hong, a senior researcher with the Division for Applied Robot Technology at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH)... is designed to resemble a Korean female in her early 20s. Fifteen motors underneath her silicon skin allow her to express a limited range of emotions, and a 400-word vocabulary enables her to hold a simple conversation." /National Geographic/

Nicholaus Copernicus: The earth is not the center of the universe (1514)

Charles Darwin: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." (1871)

Sigmund Freud: "Free will" is a delusion (1900)

Klaus Zuberbühler (psychology researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland): "These (Putty-nosed) monkey 'sentences' appear to be evidence of what is widely considered to be a uniquely human ability: stringing words together to convey a message, or syntax." (2006) /National Geographic/

"LON-CAPA is a Web-based course management system that was developed at Michigan State University (MSU). In addition to providing a way for educators to manage students and homework assignments, LON-CAPA gives students personalized problem sets, quizzes, and exams in a format that allows them to complete tasks wherever they have access to the Internet." /NewsForge/

"Government data show that girls fall behind boys in math and science as they progress through school. In the fourth grade, 68 percent of boys and 66 percent of girls say they like science, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But only one-third of high school students enrolled in Advanced Placement physics classes are girls, Spellings told summit attendees. At the college level, she continued, fewer than one-fifth of engineering majors are women." /CNN.com/

"Knowledge-based wealth, (Alvin and Heidi Toffler) argue, is revolutionary not just because it gets more output from fewer inputs. Unlike such physical resources as oil, knowledge can be shared by an infinite number of people, and its value and benefits are generally increased by wider circulation. (A network, after all, is only as powerful as the number of participants.) Just as important, the Third Wave wealth system 'demassifies production, markets and society,' creating space for unending experimentation, innovation and individuation." /The New York Times Book Review/

William Gibson on the tools of transparency:

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

/Open Source/

"Social network analysis has gained prominence in business and intelligence circles under the belief that it can yield extraordinary insights, such as the fact that people in disparate organizations have common acquaintances. So it did not surprise many security analysts to learn Thursday from USA Today that the NSA is applying the technology to billions of phone records. Computer security experts say it is often more important who is talking to who than what is being said." /Wired News/

Blogging today from beautiful Stanford, CA at the Singularity Summit. Ray Kurzweil kicked off the proceedings with a mind-blowing keynote summarizing the main points from The Singularity Is Near and commenting on a few more recent developments, particularly regarding pattern recognition advances in artificial intelligence.

Ray was followed by some prodding from physicist Doug Hoftstader (author of Godel, Escher and Bach) who implored the audience (and Ray in particular) for more credible arguments regarding the pending Singularity that rely more on science and less on science fiction.

Oxford's Nick Bostrom (and World Transhumasist Association leader) didn't help much by rambling while reading 50-60% of the slides he could get to in the allotted time. No doubt that Nick is a genius who has made significant contributions to the Transhuman movement; I just wish he was a more focused speaker.

A break from PowerPoint came with Cory Doctorow (one of my favorite scifi writers) who described the threat of DRM to agency (of which innovation, contribution and knowledge sharing are subsets) while effectively demonstrating his accelerating Continuous Partial Attention by collaborating with several other people in the audience (and elsewhere?) over a SubEthaEdit connection to blog at least three entries while on stage. In response to a question about vital skills for preparing for a post-Singularity world, Cory talked the ability to rapidly and accurately close the appropriate Windows on your computer screen. He quoted Bruce Sterling, "If you can describe what you do for a living, your job has already been outsourced."

Eric Drexler whipped through a brief primer or nanotechnology. It was cool to see such a legend in engineering. Too bad he left during the lunch break and was unable to join the panel discussion in the afternoon.

Max More of the Extropy Institute presented an entertaining and concise description of the Proactionary Principle for guiding wise (vs. simply "intelligent") decision processes. I have been a fan of Max's work for many years and it was delightful to have a moment to talk with him as well.

John Smart earns the slides-per-minute award for plowing through 89 slides in about 20 minutes. He did offer the slides as a free download and there is a wealth of fantastic depth to explore there.

Eliezer Yudowsky presented a fascinating tour of the Mind-In-General Design Space that transcends the "ethnic stereotypes" popularized in AI-focused scifi movies.

"A 3D computer simulation of 10,000 neurons firing in the human brain produces a terabyte of data--a fraction of what it would take to map the brain's billions of neurons in algorithms... The project is an attempt to create a blueprint of the human brain (using IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer) to advance cognition research." /CNET News.com/

With Google Co-op, "users with a personal Google login will be able to label web pages so the information can be easily found by other people, including friends, family and co-workers. The co-op feature also allows users to alert Google about their specific interests, like movies, restaurants and celebrity gossip, so information related to those topics appears near the top of the results page whenever they make a relevant search request." /Wired News/

"The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

"Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out." /The Nation/

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." - Howard Aiken

A report from Qinghua University, one of China's most prestigious universities, said "there will be more than 60 million bloggers in China by the end of this year (more than half of China's 110 million netizens)... (and) China expects 100 million bloggers to be writing about their life, love, angst and inspirations on the country's cyberspace by 2007." /Xinhua.com/

"China has introduced regulations that make it illegal to run an email server without a licence. The new rules, which came into force two weeks ago, mean that most companies running their own email servers in China are now breaking the law."/International Telecommunication Union

This story comes by way of Bruce Eisner: "With technology that is reminiscent of science fiction classics such as Ghost in the Shell, Lawnmower Man and Firefox, Sydney-based company Emotiv Systems will develop, with the assistance of $1.5 million in Federal Government funding, a wireless headset that will 'read' brain waves for a gaming experience that will blur the line between fantasy and reality." /theage.com.au/

Ray Kurweil's response to Kevin Kelly's essay on "What Does Technology Want?": "technological evolution emerges smoothly from the biological evolution that created the technology creating species. You mention that an evolutionary process can create greater complexity—and greater intelligence—than existed prior to the process. And it is precisely that intelligence creating process that will go into hyper drive once we can master, understand, model, simulate, and extend the methods of human intelligence through reverse-engineering it and applying these methods to computational substrates of exponentially expanding capability...

"(T)he complexity of the design of the human brain is about a billion times simpler than the actual complexity we find in the brain. This is due to the brain (like all biology) being a probabilistic recursively expanded fractal... We can ascertain the complexity of the design of the human brain because the design is contained in the genome and I show that the genome (including non-coding regions) only has about 30 to 100 million bytes of compressed information in it due to the massive redundancies
"KurzweilAI.net

Though the human brain excels at identifying patterns, it can succumb to information overload. Chicago Police Department crime analysts... hope a new neural network system will take some chance out of the equation, and add more of a scientific formula to solving crimes. /Govtech/

"Transit Lounge (Chapman House), a collection of articles from the Australian futurological publication 21C. In his brief Introduction, William Gibson notes the intellectual mix of 'Situationist Guy Debord seated opposite mathematico-hypernaut Rudy Rucker at a long metaphorical table, along with Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick ? Well, it's a hell of a guest list -- a truly stunning assemblage." /Corral the urban herds/