February 15, 2012
Robonaut is a humanoid robotic development project conducted by the Dextrous Robotics Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Robonaut differs from other current space-faring robots (such as robotic arms, cranes and exploration rovers), which are designed to move large objects; Robonaut’s tasks require more dexterity. The core idea behind the Robonaut series is to have a humanoid machine work alongside astronauts. Its form factor and dexterity are designed such that Robonaut can use space tools and work in similar environments suited to astronauts.
The latest Robonaut version, R2, the first US-built robot on the ISS, delivered by the Space Shuttle in 2011, is a robotic torso designed to assist with crew EVA’s. However, Robonaut 2 does not have adequate protection needed to exist outside the space station and enhancements and modifications would be required to allow it to move around the station’s interior.
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February 15, 2012
The concept of Cool Japan, along with that of ‘Gross National Cool,’ was coined in 2002 as an expression of Japan’s emergent status as a cultural superpower. Gaining broad exposure in the media and academia, the brand of ‘Cool Japan’ has been adopted by the Japanese government as well as trade bodies seeking to exploit the commercial capital of the country’s culture industry. It has been described as a form of soft power, ‘the ability to indirectly influence behaviour or interests through cultural or ideological means.’
In a 2002 article in ‘Foreign Policy’ entitled ‘Japan’s Gross National Cool,’ Douglas McGray wrote of Japan ‘reinventing superpower’ as its cultural influence expanded internationally despite the economic and political problems of the ‘lost decade.’ Surveying youth culture and the role of manga, anime, fashion, film, consumer electronics, architecture, cuisine, J-pop, and phenomena of cuteness such as Hello Kitty, McGray highlighted Japan’s considerable soft power, posing the question of what message the country might project. He also argued that Japan’s recession may even have boosted its national cool, due to the partial discrediting of erstwhile rigid social hierarchies and big-business career paths.
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February 15, 2012
The Lost Decade is the time after the Japanese asset price bubble’s collapse within the Japanese economy, which occurred gradually rather than catastrophically. The term originally referred to the years 1991 to 2000, but recently the decade from 2001 to 2010 is also sometimes included, so that the whole period of the 1990s and 2000s is referred to as the Lost Decades or the Lost Years.
The strong economic growth of the 1980s ended abruptly at the start of the 1990s. In the late 1980s, abnormalities within the Japanese economic system had fueled a massive wave of speculation by Japanese companies, banks and securities companies. A combination of exceptionally high land values and exceptionally low interest rates briefly led to a position in which credit was both easily available and extremely cheap. This led to massive borrowing, the proceeds of which were invested mostly in domestic and foreign stocks and securities.
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February 14, 2012
A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term—a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock—originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about himself while pretending to be another person.
The term now includes other uses of misleading online identities, such as those created to praise, defend or support a third party or organization. A significant difference between the use of a pseudonym and the creation of a sockpuppet is that the sockpuppet poses as an independent third-party unaffiliated with the puppeteer.
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February 14, 2012
A shill, plant or stooge helps someone without disclosing that he or she has a close relationship with that person or organization. Shill typically refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he or she is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller that he or she is secretly working for. The person or group that hires the shill is using crowd psychology, to encourage other onlookers or audience members to make a purchase.
Shills are often employed by confidence artists. Plant and stooge more commonly refer to any person who is secretly in league with another person or organization while pretending to be neutral or actually a part of the organization he or she is planted in, such as a magician’s audience, a political party, or an intelligence organization (double agent).
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February 13, 2012
Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture from a critical theory perspective. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Following the work of the Frankfurt School, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic inquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines.
Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones.
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February 13, 2012
Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who argued in the chapter of their book ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,’ that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods – through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.
Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. This was reference to an earlier demarcation in needs by Herbert Marcuse.
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February 10, 2012
‘Stevenote‘ is a colloquial term for the keynote speeches given by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs at events such as the Worldwide Developers Conference and previously the Macworld and Apple Expos. Jobs’ vibrant speaking style and manner of exciting the crowd was legendary. Because most Apple product releases were first revealed to the public in these keynotes, ‘Stevenotes’ often caused substantial swings in Apple’s stock price.
In late 1996, Apple purchased NeXT, and Steve Jobs returned to Apple after a 12-year hiatus following his forced resignation from the company in 1985. In mid-1997, he gave a keynote address in which he presented a detailed report on the company’s status. The keynote featured an appearance by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates by satellite. Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft comprising several key agreements that, according to Jobs, would benefit Apple and allow it to recover from its prolonged decline during the early and mid 1990s.
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February 10, 2012
Reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble (who still works at Apple) at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Tribble claimed that the term came from ‘Star Trek.’ Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of his keynote speeches (or ‘Stevenotes’) by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products.
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld (member of the original Apple team) to be Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible. While RDF has been criticized as anti-reality, those close to Jobs have also illustrated numerous instances in which creating the sense that the seemingly impossible was possible led to the impossible being accomplished. Similarly, the optimism which Jobs sowed in those around him contributed to the loyalty of his colleagues and fans.
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February 9, 2012
Ben Frost is an Australian visual artist who places common iconic images from advertising, entertainment, and politics into juxtapositions that are often confrontational and controversial. The collaborative exhibition ‘Colossus’ with Roderick Bunter in 2000 at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane featured a 12m x 2.4m mural by the artists, called ‘Where Do You Want To Go Today?’
Containing controversial imagery, including masturbating cartoon characters among a pastiche of advertising icons, the work was a statement on society’s continuing loss of innocence. In the final week of the exhibition, a disgruntled viewer entered the gallery and slashed one of the paintings with a knife.’ In 2005 he started the online art store and blog portal ‘Stupid Krap,’ which continues to support and represent a number of notable Australian emerging artists.
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February 9, 2012
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter or propagate. Any information that can be represented in binary format is representable as a number, and therefore if the information itself is illegal in some way, the pure number itself may be illegal. An illegal number may represent some type of classified information or trade secret, legal to possess only by certain authorized persons. An AACS encryption key that came to prominence in 2007 is an example of a number claimed to be a secret, and whose publication or inappropriate possession is claimed to be illegal in the United States. It allegedly assists in the decryption of any Blu-ray Disc.
As a protest of the DeCSS case, many people created ‘steganographic’ (hidden) versions of the illegal information. Dave Touretzky of Carnegie Mellon University created a ‘Gallery of DeCSS descramblers.’ In the AACS encryption key controversy, a ‘free speech flag’ was created. The illegal number was so short that a simple flag could be created by using the numbers as red-green-blue colors. The argument is that if short numbers can be made illegal, then anything based on those numbers also becomes illegal, like simple patterns of colors, etc.
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February 9, 2012
Prior art in most systems of patent law constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality. If an invention has been described in prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid. Information kept secret, for instance, as a trade secret, is not usually prior art, provided that employees and others with access to the information are under a non-disclosure obligation. With such an obligation, the information will typically not be regarded as prior art. Therefore, a patent may be granted on an invention, although someone else already knew of the invention. A person who used an invention in secret may in some jurisdictions be able to claim ‘prior user rights’ and thereby gain the right to continue using the invention.
Prior art generally does not include unpublished work or mere conversations (though according to the European Patent Convention, oral disclosures also form prior art). It is disputed whether traditional knowledge (e.g., of medical properties of a certain plant) constitutes prior art. Patents disclose to society how an invention is practiced, in return for the right (during a limited term) to exclude others from manufacturing, selling, offering for sale or using the patented invention without the patentee’s licence. Patent offices deal with prior art searches in the context of the patent granting procedure. To assess the validity of a patent application, patent offices explore the prior art that was disclosed before the invention occurred (in the United States) or before the filing date (in the rest of the world).
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