Interrelativity: musings about interrelatedness
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Spiritual Computing: Toward Meaningful, perhaps Transcendental, User Experiences
Craig Warren Smith visited Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, on Thursday to present and discuss some ideas relating to Spiritual Computing. As Craig describes it: Spiritual Computing (Spiricomp) elicits the potential of digital networks for fostering the spiritual growth among individuals and communities. … The investigative method of Spiricomp is unusual. Made possible by HH…
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The Beginning of the End of America
Keith Olbermann is my hero. In a scathing commentary on George W. Bush’s recent signing of the Military Commissions Act, Keith takes the president to task, comparing him and this act to earlier presidents and similar actions that gave them the authority to ignore and abuse the constitutional rights of our citizens: John Adams’ Alien…
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Nokia Research Center’s 20th Anniversary: Cultivating Freedom, Accountability and Risk
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of Nokia Research Center. I happened to be in Helsinki to attend a strategy workshop on Thursday, and arriving a day early enabled me to attend the festivities at the main office of NRC. Antti-Jussi Suominen was the master of ceremonies in an event that featured…
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1984, Big Brotherhood, Hierarchies, Power and the American Way
I just finished re-reading 1984 (the Centennial Edition), by George Orwell, and as he himself says The best books are those that tell you what you already know. 1984 depicts a dystopian future wherein three superstates — Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia — are engaged perpetual warfare, which is used to maintain the poverty and ignorance…
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Bruce Sterling on Shaping Things through SPIMES: Technosocial Transformations for a Sustainable World
Bruce Sterling’s keynote at UbiComp 2006 inspired me to go back and re-read his book Shaping Things, in which he introduces the notion of SPIMES — physical objects with digital histories that can be recorded and tracked through SPace and tIME. I didn’t think all the ideas from this book shined clearly through in his…
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Keith Olbermann on George Bush and George Orwell
Recent developments in global geopolitics have been reminding me of George Orwell‘s book, 1984. I read the book in high school, and decided to buy a new copy and re-read it to refresh my memory of the dystopian future laid out in the book … signs of which are increasingly apparent today. The book depicts…
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Great Customer Care from United Airlines and Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Yesterday morning, I was dismayed to hear the voicemail of the United Airlines‘ automated flight change notification service telling me my flight to San Francisco was cancelled. The message said I’d been rerouted, and would not arrive until much later in the day. I called United Reservations, but the human operator I finally got through…
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John Shen: New Head of Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto
John Shen, former DIrector of the Micro-architecture Lab at Intel, became the new head of Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, on Friday. John comes to NRCPA after 6.5 years at Intel, and 18 years before that as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In his welcome welcoming remarks, John stressed his intention to cultivate a…
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Techno-Spiritual Practices and New Technologies of Enlightenment (A UbiComp 2006 Postscript)
Genevieve Bell, of Intel Research, was unable to attend UbiComp 2006, and so, unfortunately, her paper on "No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices" was not presented at the conference. I read the paper on my return flight, and it was so inspiring I wanted to post a few notes about it.…
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UbiComp 2006: Day 3
Today was the final day of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2006). I'm going to include some notes from today's presentations (continuing a series of notes I've posted from day 1 and day 2 of the conference), and finish off with a few reflections on the conference as a whole. Mark Corner,…