1,212 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2015
  2. Jun 2015
    1. How has culture developed technologies to extend and enhance the senses, cre- ating an “exosomatic” array of devices that compensate for the limits of our crea- turely nature?

      Always a bit allergic to the supplementary/extension framing for technology. Seems prevalent lots of these discussions of sense (cf. McLuhan).

  3. May 2015
    1. Transhumanists are at war with the bioconservatives. This just sounds like a William Gibson sci-fi novel. We live in amazing times. That said, global bans on technology and science never work; they just really mess things up. Regardless of what the bioconservatives think, there are cultures that will embrace these technologies (and already do). Historically, and possibly without exception, countries that ban or hobble new technologies eventually regret it because at least some of their neighbors will not follow suit. Further, by outright turning their back on the technology, they lose any voice they might have had in determining how it will be employed.

  4. Apr 2015
    1. "Racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusionary behavior are in and of themselves nuanced and multilayered," says Freada Kapor Klein, a prominent advocate for tech diversity and founder of the not-for-profit Level Playing Field Institute.
  5. Mar 2015
  6. ronja.twibright.com ronja.twibright.com
    1. Ronja is a free technology project for reliable optical data links with a current range of 1.4km and a communication speed of 10Mbps full duplex. Applications of this wireless networking device include backbone of free, public, and community networks, individual and corporate Internet connectivity, and also home and building security. High reliability and availability linking is possible in combination with WiFi devices. The Twibright Ronja datalink can network neighbouring houses with cross-street ethernet access, solve the last mile problem for ISP’s, or provide a link layer for fast neighbourhood mesh networks.
  7. Nov 2014
  8. Aug 2014
    1. Phones can only work when they know where they are and are telling the phone company that. It’s not surveillance, it’s how radio waves work. This is the first reason for the network to work the way it does. The second? Billing. In fact, most of the surveillance networks in the world weren’t built to surveil at all, but to make things work at a fundamental level, and to bill people. Surveillance and intrusion are opportunistically inserted into good infrastructure.
  9. Jun 2014
    1. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

      "Technology leadership is....defined by...the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world's most talented engineers."

      The key components of this applied "open source philosophy" seem to be about increasing input, visibility, and collective motivation by taking fear out of the interaction equation.

  10. Feb 2014
  11. Jan 2014
    1. Policies and procedures sometimes serve as an active rather than passive barrier to data sharing. Campbell et al. (2003) reported that government agencies often have strict policies about secrecy for some publicly funded research. In a survey of 79 technology transfer officers in American universities, 93% reported that their institution had a formal policy that required researchers to file an invention disclosure before seeking to commercialize research results. About one-half of the participants reported institutional policies that prohibited the dissemination of biomaterials without a material transfer agreement, which have become so complex and demanding that they inhibit sharing [15].

      Policies and procedures are barriers, but there are many more barriers beyond that which get in the way first.