ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied Minds

Grok Headline matches for ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied Minds

To Do in LA 04/25: Danny Hillis + Brian
Eno

To Do in LA 04/25: Danny Hillis + Brian
Eno 04/18/2005 02:40 PM
Xeni Jardin: If you're in Los Angeles on Monday, April 25, there's a really neat event happening at the Skirball Center:

Legendary musician, producer, and visual artist Brian Eno sits down with scientist and technical wizard Danny Hillis to discuss their inventive careers and explore the theme of creativity. Both Eno and Hillis are board members of the Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote "slower/better" thinking.

Link

A Morning With Danny Hillis.

A Morning With Danny Hillis. 06/17/2004 07:25 PM
John Battelle's Searchblog: A Morning With Danny Hillis.

John Battelle visits Applied Minds, a
Willy Wonka-esque nerdvana

John Battelle visits Applied Minds, a
Willy Wonka-esque nerdvana 06/17/2004 06:12 PM
John describes his mind-blowing tour through Applied Minds, a Glendale, CA consultancy started by former Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren.

After chit chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood one of those classic red English phone booths. We stepped inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.

From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things strange and beautiful. Over to one side stood the Terminator-like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, its 15-foot pneumatic legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls, itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with built-in kitchen and bedroom. The space was a great big project lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer picnic. It's Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for geeks.

Link

Etech Notes

Etech Notes 03/17/2005 03:37 AM
Transcribed two sessions: Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing (video snip) Tags and Folksonomies Panel...

ETECH Notes: Von Neumann's Universe

ETECH Notes: Von Neumann's Universe 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from George Dyson's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Vo n Neumann's Universe." Dyson's father, Freeman Dyson, was a contemporary of Einstein, Godel, Von Neumman and all, and raised George in their company and still tells him stories about those days. George Dyson has been collecting historical notes and recollections of the early days of the computer (and the bomb). His presentation, which draws on personal reminiscences, was funny, bawdy and fascinating

Von Neumann's reports were all public and non-proprietary -- they were freely shared with NCR, IBM, RCA, etc.

The memory was really unreliable and sloppy -- the difference between a 1 and a 0 was very subtle. Getting all this stuff to work was akin to getting today's unreliable Internet services to work.

The hackers' notebooks are full of bile: YAWN, CLOSING DOWN IN DISGUST, MANIAC LOST ITS MEMORY REGAINED ITS MEMORY, GARBAGE, CODE ERROR MACHINE NOT GUILTY, DAMN IT I CAN BE AS STUBBORN AS THIS THING, IBM IS PUTTING A TAR-LIKE SUBSTANCE ONT HE CARDS, MOUSE CRAWLED INTO BELT: RESULT NO MORE MOUSE. I HAVE NOW DUPLICATED BOTH RESULTS HOW WILL I KNOW WHICH IS RIGHT?

Link

Update: Carrott reminds us that George Dyson gave a similar talk at the Long Now Foundation in Jan 2004 -- you can download the audio from their lecture series page.

ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search
and A9

ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search
and A9 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from Jeff Bezos's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Ve rtical Search and A9." A9 has added a ton of tools to let people design their own domain-expert searches.

There are lots of things you can do if you're a domain expert in vertical search. If you're a medical pro and you search on Vioxx, you'll get different results from Web search and PubMed.

The data-sets are different and the relevance ranking and the transformations on the query are all different too.

PubMed takes the user-query and does sophisticated transformations, e.g. "Heart attack" into many medical terms.

The Web-search on Vioxx is mostly about class-action lawsuits, while the vertical is about medical info.

A9.com has a visual metaphor for vertical search -- columns for web results, image results, and reference results, your bookmarks, etc...

Link

ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live!

ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live! 03/19/2005 03:03 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann's Li fe Hacks Live, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Danny's been doing variations on his Life Hacks talk since the last Emerging Tech conference -- it's basically an effort to research the productivity patterns of very prolific geeks and convert them to wisdom that anyone can follow. Merlin has been adapting the fantastic productivity cookbook Getting Things Done into a series of tools for geeks, on an equally fantastic blog called 43 Folders. They're now working on a book version of their stuff for O'Reilly called Life Productivity Hacks, and today's session was a preview of it -- it was uproariously funny and incredibly inspiring.

Here's a recap of last year, in bumper stickers:

HACKERS HEART PLAIN TEXT

Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and extraction, cut and paste. All you need in a filing system.

MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN

If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in ~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share with others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.

SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND LIKE IT. OH YES.

(don't put this on your car)

Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing everything -- put it in public and the public organizes it for you. Put it on a Wiki and others will fix it.

Link

ETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy
for Startups

ETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy
for Startups 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: Flickr's Stewart Butterfield just delivered a fantastic talk called We b Services as a Strategy for Startups: Opening Up and Letting Go, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It was a guided tour of the lessons learned from the exhaustive and powerful Flickr API, which has attracted tons of innovative development. Here are my notes from the talk:

We've gotten a lot out of the open API:

* Trust: do you trust your data to someone else's service? Why put my photos there when I can keep them on my own server and know they're safe? API is a safeguard against us being bad

* We've added features we wouldn't have done on our own

* There's cred with the alpha geeks: very influential and good at getting the word out; when it's Xmas and someone gets a new digital camera, they're the ones getting asked what do do with their photos

* Discipline: Makes us plan ahead further than we could have

* Unleashing creativity: Gives people a greater sense of ownership when they can contribute, they buy into the process

Link< /a>

ETECH Notes: Surowiecki on Independent
Individuals and Wise Crowds

ETECH Notes: Surowiecki on Independent
Individuals and Wise Crowds 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from James Surowiecki's In dependent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations is meant to be quite good -- it's sitting in my pile of things I need to read as soon as I get a chance. Based on his talk, I think I might bump it up a couple of positions.

Wisdom of crowds works on problems where there's a true answer, or when some choices are better than other in some Platonic sense. The reason this works is that people are operating on private info, which may be bad or fragmented.

The opinions are diverse -- not consensus but disagreements.

People don't know much about what others are betting on or guessing -- not a lot of interpersonal interaction.

Compare with Linux: large group of people working on problems, but ultimately one person writes the code that gets committed. The decision is centralized: one or a small number of people get to commit code to the kernel.

Compare with ant-hill: Often a metaphor for human behavior. How to use a bunch of dumb agents (ants don't know much) whose interaction produce stunningly intelligent results, e.g. finding food with least amount of energy. E.g. ant graveyards and food supplies are equidistant.

Ants follow simple rules and pay a lot of attention to those around them: interaction is the essence of intelligence. The only way to get where they want to go is by paying close attention to one another.

Here's my message: HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT ANTS. We do not have the biological programming or tools to allow this kind of interaction to produce intelligence. We don't have the ability to sense or secrete formic acid.

Link

ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Mess

ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Mess 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from "Fo lksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags to shared items (such as blog-posts, encyclopedia entries, photos, links, lists or interests, or what have you) and then discovering which tegs users share with one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags aren't "controlled" -- any user can invent one and any user can apply them to anything, and yet it all works.

Jimmy: We launched ours last summer after knowing we needed it for a long time. For the first two weeks in English Wikipedia, it was a madhouse with all kinds of categorization. The Germans were more reserved but after a few weeks it caught on there. Eventually, because people could adjust categories, it all settled down. We did it because that's the Wikipedia way -- we never considered doing it any other way.

Stewart: It's not really categorization on Flickr -- it's about letting users remember. If I add the "Norma" tag to pix of my mom, whose name is Norma, I don't think it goes into the Norma category. The unfortunate thing about the term "folksonomy" is that it implies that it's a replacement for categorization. People categorize things by noting what they do or don't have: mammals have hair and live babies; does it have property a? then it's a whatever.

Joshua: I was collecting 20,000 links in a text-file, and somewhere along the way I started adding a hash mark and some text, so I could e.g. grep out all the WiFi links and send them to a friend. Later I built a Web version so I could send an URL to a friend, but it was standalone. Eventually I made it massively multiplayer. The interesting group behavior is the tagging that isn't categorization, e.g., "To read" -- not a category, though it has a big group and a lot of social and user context. People make tags for groups working together, workflow in RSS -- that's what's most surprising.

Link

ETECH Notes: Feral Robotics and Some
Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling Robots

ETECH Notes: Feral Robotics and Some
Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling Robots 03/17/2005 03:55 AM
Cory Doctorow: Here are my notes from Natalie Jeremijenko's So cial Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Natalie is a genuine cyberpunk heroine, whose hacks include hacking robot toy dogs into feral volatile organic compound sensors; setting up voicemail boxes you can call when you want to record your interactions with Homeland Security coppers, and surreptitiously filming jumpers off the Golden Gate bridge.

Feral Robotic Dogs: It's a website. Everything reduces to a website. A couple years old, dates back to the launch of the Sony Aibo. One in a series of interactive toys that express behaviors programmed in our labs -- they're fun and interesting and sci-fi-ey. But what do you learn from them? You learn construction from construction toys, monopolization from Monopoly. What do you learn from interactive toys? Interaction?

These toy dogs out of the box beg for bones or sing the national anthem.

I became interested in this when someone said to me that a robot dog would make a good pet for me -- what does that say about my capacity to care for living things? What might we learn from these things? What do we need to learn from these things.

Here's the website (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots) with instructions for upgrading the raison d'être of your robot dogs.

Warning label: OUT THERE IN HAPPY FAMILY HOMES IN THE OFFICE OF CORPORATE EXECS, IN TOY STORES THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE IS AN ARMY OF ROBOTIC DOGS. THESE REMI-AUTONOMOUS ROBOT CREATURES, THOUGH CURRENTLY PROGRAMMED TO PERFORM INANE OR ENTERTAINING TASKS, ARE ACTUALLY FULLY MOTILE AND AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Link

Oh, Danny Bot

Oh, Danny Bot 08/09/2004 01:06 PM

What happens when a man and his robot are parted? The answer, according to this short film by Frank Lesser, appears to be "crooning." Danny Bot is a heartfelt tale of clanking love lost as the world is torn asunder by the inevitable robot uprising. I shed a real human tear. (Thanks, Jon!)

Watch - MPEG Version [DannyBot]

FC Now: Did Danny Have to Go?

FC Now: Did Danny Have to Go? 02/05/2005 09:57 PM
The old "You're Fired" routine hit guitar-playing, college-educated Danny last night. The poor boy seemed awfully surprised by Trump's decision, even though you knew Dan was done for in the very first episode--not nearly macho enough for the Trump crowd....

danny bot: the film

danny bot: the film 07/31/2004 06:58 PM
Boy sings tribute to his robot who’s off to war .. DannyBot

dannybot.com/mpg.html
track this site | 3 links

Interview with Danny Lee from XGI

Interview with Danny Lee from XGI 03/26/2005 07:07 AM

Danny O'Brien:

Danny O'Brien: 01/04/2004 10:43 PM
Danny O'Brien: "It's the real secrets; the real hide-aways; the people who are always either in public mode or in an ultra-ultra-secret combination we can barely guess at who are the dangerous ones. And they're a lot harder to spot from fifty yards, and a damn sight more immune to gentle satire."

An Interview with Danny Sullivan

An Interview with Danny Sullivan 08/12/2004 07:42 AM
This interview is the beginning of a series on search engines. We'll briefly look at their history, and delve into some of the techniques of optimizing Web sites for search engines. By Lee Underwood. 0812

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka 08/09/2004 02:31 AM
how famous do you want to be?

oblomovka.com/entries/2004/08/08#1091959020
track this site | 2 links

Hapy Birthday to Danny

Hapy Birthday to Danny 01/16/2004 11:28 AM
It's my 40th Birthday Today!.

It's my 40th Birthday Today!

Bob asked for more metadata on my earlier post. Hopefully the <title> of this post is explicit enough. I've not got around to sorting out the machine-readable version yet - I think I'll try Semaview's calendar tool for that part of the data. Morten has done some nice work tidying up my Amazon Wishlist Web Service XSLT and has writted a script to combine all pages. I still need to clean out the bad URIs from my FOAF profile (sorry scutters!).

But in the meantime, here's the human-readable version of my wishlist, hint hint ;-)[Raw]

Danny Kaye, James Beard and me

Danny Kaye, James Beard and me 09/03/2004 08:27 AM
Forget the knives -- eat the onion sandwich! Recipe included.

Danny Seo, rolling in green
(USATODAY.com)

Danny Seo, rolling in green
(USATODAY.com) 08/31/2004 03:47 PM
USATODAY.com - Say "environment" to Danny Seo, and it's as if you've punched the word into the search engine Google: Out roars an avalanche of ideas and references that threatens to scramble your brain. (Related story: How Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and others go green)

Bambi and Danny Talk Google

Bambi and Danny Talk Google 08/09/2004 12:58 PM
Search Engine Lowdown Aug 9 2004 5:22PM GMT

" Genti entra no meu bl0g vai da uma
... Danny"

" Genti entra no meu bl0g vai da uma
... Danny" 12/27/2004 09:35 PM

Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks

Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks 06/06/2004 06:44 AM
Here are my running notes from Danny O'Brien's NotCon recapulation of his "Life Hacks" talk. Danny interviewed a bunch of prolific geeks and asked them how they do it: this is his distillation of the habits of the geeks who spew the most code, words and such. Wish he'd turn this into a book already!

People use todo.txt (Ford's is 27,000 lines long)

* Don't use complicated apps

* Use Word, BBEdit, Notepad, emacs, vi, whatever

* Why?

* If you want to organize yourself, take the stuff you're going to forget quickly and dump it just as quickly -- if it's in your short-term memory, you have to put it somewhere

* You need to be able to find and enter text fast

* Can cut, paste and find text fast

* XML Guy: "Not interested in tagging my behavior with metadata -- just want to find stuff. Google shows that text cna be found quick"

* Text editors have incremental search (Mozilla: type slash and begin typing for your search string) -- quick way to lock-in on your desired text

* In Moz, Panther, Launchbar, Quicksilver, etc

* Text can be trusted

* Power users trust software as far as they've thrown them in the past

* Power users know that the bigger an app, the flakier it is

* They've upgraded and crossgraded a lot, which means that they need text, which can run on every platform

Link

Danny’s Address Book Date Scripts
1.1

Danny’s Address Book Date Scripts
1.1 04/14/2004 10:36 PM
Three AppleScripts for Address book to calculate an individual’s age, sign, etc.

Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook
Updated For Mac Os X

Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook
Updated For Mac Os X 02/05/2005 09:53 PM
ARLINGTON, Virginia (February 4, 2005) - SpiderWorks, LLC today announced the exclusive eBook release of "Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook (Mac OS X Edition)". One of the most recommended...

[[ Visit http://www.macmegasite.com for full article ]]

An Interview with Danny Sullivan, Search
Engine Expert

An Interview with Danny Sullivan, Search
Engine Expert 08/13/2004 12:40 PM
Source: WebReference - This interview is the beginning of a series on search engines. We'll briefly look at their history, and delve into some of the techniques of optimizing Web sites for search engines....

Danny Sullivan answers your Google
Florida update questions

Danny Sullivan answers your Google
Florida update questions 12/05/2003 04:23 PM
Search Engine Lowdown Dec 5 2003 3:12PM ET

Steve Rubel on Danny Sullivan on the
Yahoo Search Blog

Steve Rubel on Danny Sullivan on the
Yahoo Search Blog 09/13/2004 11:37 PM
In Key Analyst Guest Blogs on Yahoo!'s Weblog, PR blogger Steve Rubel asks the questions I've been expecting someone to ask about Danny Sullivan's recent appearance on the Search Blog: Will people now begin to question Danny's objectivity? Danny is a former client. From my brief experience working with him, I can assure you that he has the utmost integrity and a sterling reputation. He's a professional. But I am wondering if this move might change how he's perceived. Will...

they changed their minds again, or
un-changed their minds

they changed their minds again, or
un-changed their minds 01/05/2005 11:34 AM
reverse themselves on a revision to an ethics rule .. reversed their position on a pending rule change .. NY Times

nytimes.com/2005/01/04/politics/04cong.html
track this site | 3 links

Blowing our minds

Blowing our minds 06/14/2004 08:25 AM
Martin Torgoff, author of "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000," talks about America's complicated and schizophrenic history with drugs.

3G still to win hearts and minds?

3G still to win hearts and minds? 05/27/2004 12:14 AM
ZDNet Australia May 27 2004 4:28AM GMT

RB minds the mind

RB minds the mind 01/18/2004 02:45 PM
RageBoy talks a quick trot through AI, cognitive psychology and philosophy, proving once again that autodidacts are the best educated people on the planet. Since RB ties me into the piece — I am not worthy, I am not worthy — let me answer the question he ends with: "I don't know quite how I got here from Fodor's funny take on Dasein." Here's how you got there, muh friend. In a few pithy — and NC-17 — paragraphs you raise the notion of Dasein, and then take us through the clumsy way AI has tried to reincorporate the baby...

Why We Keep Open Minds

Why We Keep Open Minds 09/07/2004 06:37 AM
Gravity Monuments were erected on several college campuses in the 1960's and 1970's by the Gravit y Research Foundation "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled." I regularly visited the one at Colby College, in Maine. Emory had one, and apparently SMU did as well. Anyone know of others?

Applied democracy

Applied democracy 01/12/2004 02:56 AM

About the Emergent Democracy Worldwide session at the Digital Democracy Teach-In, the Head Lemur says,

This may be the single most important seminar of this conference. Participation in Emergent Democracy requires a computer and an internet connection. This is the bottom line. Where you can go from there is limited only by your desire and participation. While we have this group of folks in the building, let's lower the bar bills and increase the participation in emergent democracy.

Then he adds a suggestion: A computer roadshow. Interesting idea.

Is Applied Materials a Buy?

Is Applied Materials a Buy? 04/12/2005 01:24 PM
Although it's been painful for the past year, you might want to look at this company again.

Applied PoMo

Applied PoMo 01/16/2004 11:33 AM
Terry Heaton is a "New Media consultant" in Nashville who's writing a book: TV News in a Postmodern World. His latest essay, "News Is A Conversation," builds on and around Doc's cluetrain meme. Terry also blogs about something like Applied Post Modernism with lots of good info and ideas....

Applied Materials Was Right

Applied Materials Was Right 05/19/2004 01:19 PM
The leading semiconductor equipment maker builds off a solid first quarter.

How to win hearts and minds by losing.

How to win hearts and minds by losing. 07/16/2004 01:34 PM
Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. "For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism."

An opinion about how the surety of losing wins votes for the Republican party.
Grok Description matches for ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied Minds
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ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied Minds

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