Layer by layer an idea is made real. Additive manufacturing technology, better known as 3D printing, has transformed the Gelardin New Media Center into a micro-factory, with two busy MakerBots working to turn computer renderings into tangible objects. This time they are rendering innovative snack bar ideas to help No Kid Hungry prototype and bring to market a new product with the Toms Shoes business model: buy a snack bar and feed a kid for lunch...

Kevin Kelley asked the crowd to envision plausible and desirable 100 year futures in 100 words and offered $100 as a reward for the one he would most like to live in. Kelley's commentary on envisioning positive futures is powerful and his contribution of a desirable future is inspiring. "It’s a hard assignment. Compressing anything as messy as the future into 100 words is a near-impossible challenge. Almost like writing poetry. And 100 years is so immensely distant from us that we need to fictionalize it. But the most difficult part is imagining a scenario that is desirable.” "My choice for the most plausible vision of a future I desire goes to John Hanacek’s scenario. I think I’d like to live there, and I think it is plausible in 100 years. My $100 goes to him." - Kevin Kelley, kk.org

Our civilization has a new reality. Computers meshed together by digital networks have transcended the system that built them becoming a new reality, a place where duplicating and moving information has near zero marginal cost. This alone has changed the nature of the world; we have a virtual playground where the reality of scarcity we have known and endured is largely gone....

In this two-part blog, John Hanacek forecasts a future in which the line between material and virtual reality is gradually more blurred, with people living in both realms simultaneously. In this new world, the Internet may also be increasingly a real-time extension of our memory and our access to knowledge, answering our questions before they are even posed and potentially manipulating our desires and our behavior. Hanacek looks first at the upside of the “answer engine Internet” and then at its dangers.

As a recovering 'mathphobe' working in software and UX design I am now hungry to internalize mathematical concepts, yet finding there is still a disconnect between my desired level of programming prowess and the realities of the computer medium. I am on a quest to learn myself and make it easier for everyone else to learn. I believe that everyone deserves to know how to think systematically and execute their intention in the form of computer programs. The ability to implement formal logic is part of the new literacy. It can usher in a new kind of metamathematical language tool where human expression is the code.

Can we use sketching into computers to help teach concepts of logic? Or more grandiosely: Can we allow young children to use their innate drawing abilities to explore advanced concepts in programming and logic at their own pace all while their hearts and minds are engaged? I propose a forwarding of the design thinking behind Alan Kay’s Dynabook concept, while updating it with new research into sketch-based learning and creation tools. This piece is broken into 4 parts with a conclusion.

The aim of this paper is to describe the process and results of capturing, tracing, and visualizing the spread and evolution of Technology enhanced instructional strategies within medical and graduate education. The paper shows the resulting network of influences in relation to the adoption of these strategies across individuals and communities within Georgetown University as well as beyond its organizational boundaries. The paper concludes by proposing that a knowledge exchange framework may serve as an alternative to more traditional evaluation methods and return on investment models used in higher education.

Are the most recent digital monopolies flukes, or are monopolies still an overall feature of the networked world? Despite early proclamations that the Internet could resist monopoly, is there some broader systemic reason why monopoly has re-emerged at this juncture of the Internet? In this paper, I explore Yochai Benkler's discussion of new non-commercial forms of cultural production by juxtaposing these conceptions with excerpts from Tobias Schäfer's Bastard Culture. This analysis is framed through the lens of David Singh Grewal’s Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization and guided by the long perspective provided by Fernand Braudel's seminal analysis of the emergence of Capitalism in Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800...

In its current usage as a targeted killing platform, the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) or ‘drone’ represents a fundamental challenge to the idea of proportionality as discussed in just war theory. In combining surveillance and strike into a singular package devoid of risk to its operators, RPA have become a destabilizing force to the ideas of justice in war–jus in bello–and justice of war–jus ad bellum–due to the shift in risk calculation that their unique capabilities allow. The concept of proportionality is understood as managing the use of force such that it does not become a greater evil than the one it is fighting. In removing any threat to operators’ lives, the drone critically unbalances the notion of proportionality and risks making the choice to deploy lethal force seductively easy...‍

On May 20, 2010, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced it had created the world’s first self-replicating synthetic (human–made from chemical parts) genome in a bacterial cell of a different species. In response, President Obama tasked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to explore and review the developing field of synthetic biology, with an eye toward ethical boundaries and risk mitigation. They published “New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies” in December of 2010. Aside from ethical and efficacy explorations the report takes time to explicitly discuss the newness of synthetic biology, and the Commission takes a decidedly pragmatic stance on said newness...

Some years ago I began to wonder: how does information propagate inside of networks? Does it have general dynamics that hold true across all networks? I wanted to know beyond the symptom level, I wanted to know what flowing “looks like” at the level of node-to-node communication. How does a given node “see" the inside of a network?

Intellectual property law in the US has noble intentions, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Patent in particular was designed to protect and incentivize the inventor to innovate. However, through decades of evidence, particularly as observed in software and digital technology, it is becoming clear that patent protection serves more to protect entrenched monopolies than incentivize innovation. Patent is not a particularly powerful incentive to innovate; in fact over time it increasingly functions inversely to this goal. More deeply, patent is intrinsically incompatible with the nature of technology. The modular nature of technology sees patent gridlock becoming an inevitable fixture of any sufficiently advanced technological landscape...

When the human noise started, the ancient comms dissolved, the Quiet Corridor is just a start of reparations for the sea. The intrepid researchers who Zeb found for this mission shared a common desire to bring justice to the nonhuman persons of the ocean before they started, he just had the specific idea, money for gear and a modest yet capable research vessel ready to set sea.

Buzz Buzz Buzz BUZZZZZ *tap* The alarm is silenced. Franklin groans, gets up and walks to the bathroom. Lights on, he looks in the mirror. Piss, shower, brush teeth, all happen automatically. Conscious brain not bothered to wake yet. Franklin continues automatically, dresses, grabs some kind of fiber bar from his pantry and heads out the door....

In my time, I am the earth's orgasm. I am the earth’s anger. I am the earth musing. I am the earth laughing. In my time I am an electric thought hung in the atmosphere of this world’s being - suspended in an electric universe, all one pattern yet of many scales...

Atter skatch into a sunbeam, our tendril finds coherency Oscillating the expander… ... Quantized! As structured light crystallizes into the receiver web, I ponder: what was life like before the remembrance of the sun?...

“Back off Terrance or whoever you are, I mean it!” Susie’s avatar declares. “What I’m just wondering what you think you’re doing over here in the nanofab sim lab all by yourself when you know its a dude zone, you looking for some dick? I got some” This Terrance Avatar opened its right hand for direct pict share.And Susie’s avatar blasted out a red barrier that rendered the other avatar a formless blob. The blob knows that this shield is up, so it starts to move around, circling. ...

Ara likes to walk alone, walking alone gives her more time with her Eyez. She makes a finger gun at the stop sign and blows overlaid bullet holes into it, little bit of clipping on the overlay as she does a quick spin around and throws some GIFfetti in the air of shiba inu on a skeleton head dancing back and forth. Doge makes her feel better haha

“Oh my God, everyone view-share with me you have to see this!” Amy blurted out using all her stored reputation score to do the biggest exclamation she could afford on ViewMe. Her view showed the protestor’s worst fears: the police had infiltrated the barrier. It had been a trick! If anyone had bothered to check a sat-view they would have seen the cops massing at the south side of the park. Instead everyone had view-shared with someone looking at a detachment of police on the north east side of the park firing tear gas cans like bullets into the demonstrators...

I'm laughing my ass off when my Agent materializes before me. "What do you want?!" I ask grouchily, trying to get it to go away since it usually represents work for me. "Sir, I have fielded an incoming call as you from a person named 'Steve' who I cannot ascertain whether is an agent or not. My inference database has found evidence in your social cloud that you do know this person, would you like to take this call?" Ug, fine whatever. "Ya ya connect me." ...

In the mirror he straightens his tie. Not often does he wear them, but tonight is special. His blockchain protocol MetaCoin has completed its initial coin offering and now his team is worth three hundred and sixty four million dollars. That is still the currency of food, so Arjuna considers himself blessed that many millions of times...

The fires have been raging for decades, and each season there are less houses. More and more folks are just roaming the streets and sleeping in the still temperate climate of Southern California. There’s becoming so many that it’s not much use to talk about policing them, and the housing market just keeps building luxury condos and trying to extract high profits. So, entrepreneurs like Terrance, the Shelter founder, are stepping up to the plate with solutions for our fellow homeless citizens. Those high condo profits are doing something in the roundabout through the California Sheltering Hope fund that pays our bills...

Every day at around lunchtime it was the same: Carl would retire to the school’s VR lab, don a pair of goggles, stand in front of the highest resolution tracker array and load up the “Universe Evolution and Entropy Simulation Environment” in a private room in the school's VR environment.He’d scale it out to “observable universe” and run it again and again. He placed himself at every 3D angle, did elaborate 3D repositions as he ran time forward and backward. Over and over and over...

The kids usually hammed it up during the expression capture part. The system did its best to smooth out the input but it always led to the kids’ avatars being a bit overly expressive. It better reflected their spirit, Ms. Chang had always thought.

“Where the hell is John!? He has the model for the cable captures! We can’t load the bridge without him!” Jordan was pissed, she and the rest of Team Orange were all assembled at the starting zone and had loaded their pieces of the bridge assignment into the sim-space. It was a beautiful design; Steve and her had really gone all out in meshing the pieces together. But John had the cable captures and they couldn’t load the bridge into the physics space until he showed up with them.