October 9, 2013
Victor Papanek (1923 – 1998) was a designer and educator who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless. Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations.
He wrote that ‘design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).’ With his interest in all aspects of design and how they affected people and the environment, Papanek felt that much of what was manufactured in the U.S. was inconvenient, often frivolous and even unsafe.
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October 7, 2013
‘Under a Killing Moon‘ is the third installment in the ‘Tex Murphy’ series of graphic adventure games produced by Access Software in 1994. It was one of the largest video games of its era, arriving on four CD-ROMs (although some material was duplicated among the four to reduce the amount of swapping).
The game combined full motion video (FMV) cutscenes with an advanced 3D virtual world to explore. After its creators reacquired the rights to the series, it was re-released on ‘Good Old Games’ in 2009.
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October 2, 2013
Feature creep (also known as ‘creeping featurism’ or ‘featuritis’) is the unchecked expansion or addition of new features in a product. Such features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design. The most common cause of feature creep is the desire to provide the consumer with a more useful or desirable product, in order to increase sales or distribution.
However, once the product reaches the point at which it does everything that it is designed to do, the manufacturer is left with the choice of adding unneeded functions, sometimes at the cost of efficiency, or sticking with the old version, at the cost of a perceived lack of improvement. Another major cause of feature creep might be a compromise from a committee which decides to implement multiple, different viewpoints in the same product. Then, as more features are added to support each viewpoint, it might be necessary to have cross-conversion features between the multiple viewpoints, further complicating the total features.
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October 1, 2013
The Moller Skycar is a prototype personal VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft invented by Paul Moller who has been attempting to develop such vehicles for fifty years (with limited success).
The craft said to be currently under development, the M400, is purported to transport four people. It is described as a car since it is aimed at being a popular means of transport for anyone who can drive, incorporating automated flight controls, with the driver only inputting direction and speed required with a cruising speed of 305 mph.
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September 29, 2013
Kwangmyong (lit. ‘Bright’) is a North Korean ‘walled garden’ national intranet opened in 2000. It may be accessed by web browsers, incorporates email services, news groups, and an internal web search engine. In North Korea, only a small number of government-authorized persons are allowed to use the global Internet, so Kwangmyong is the only computer network available to common people. It is a free service for public use.
Given that there is no direct connection to the outside Internet, unwanted information cannot enter the network. Information is filtered and processed by government agencies before being hosted on the North Korean Intranet. Cuba and Myanmar also use a similar network system that is separated from the rest of the Internet, and Iran has been reported as having future plans to implement such a network.
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September 29, 2013
Formula E is a class of auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). The ‘formula,’ designated in the name, refers to a set of rules with which all participants’ cars must comply. Formula E is intended to be the highest class of competition for one-make, single-seat, electrically-powered racing cars. The inaugural championship is planned for 2014. Forty-two cars were ordered in 2012, with Formula One team McLaren providing the motor, transmission and electronics that all cars will use.
Racing circuits will be held in cities, and will be approximately 2.5 km to 3 km long; Cars will accelerate from 0 km/h to 100 km/h in 3 seconds, with a maximum speed of 220 km/h; and Noise decibel levels will be approximately -80dB (ordinary car – 70dB; bus – 90dB; Formula One track – 130dB). Pit stops will involve a change of car: when the battery runs out, the driver will make a pit stop, then will run 100 meters to climb into a recharged car.
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September 27, 2013
Precision guided firearms (PGFs) are long-range rifle systems designed to improve the accuracy of shooting at targets at extended ranges through target tracking, heads-up display, and advanced fire control.
Inspired by missile lock-on and fighter jet technology, the application of PGF technology to small arms mitigates multiple sources of marksman error including mis-aim, trigger jerk and shot setup miscalculation. PGFs can significantly increase first shot success probability (FSSP) out to extreme ranges of 1,200 yards or more. PGFs are fully integrated systems consisting of a standard caliber bolt action or semi-automatic rifles combined with a networked tracking scope and a guided trigger.
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September 23, 2013
‘NBA Jam‘ is an arcade game first developed by Midway in 1993 by programmer and game designer Mark Turmell. The game featured 2-on-2 basketball and is one of the first sports games to offer NBA-licensed teams and players, and their real digitized likenesses. Midway had previously released such sports games as ‘Arch Rivals’ in 1989 (another 2-on-2 basketball game, on which NBA Jam’s gameplay is based), ‘High Impact’ in 1990, and ‘Super High Impact’ in 1991, but ‘NBA Jam’ was the company’s first major hit.
The game became exceptionally popular, and generated a significant amount of money for arcades after its release, creating revenue of $1 billion in quarters. Its success gave rise to a new genre of sports games which were based around fast, action-packed gameplay and exaggerated realism, a formula which Midway would also later apply to the sports of football (‘NFL Blitz’), and hockey (‘2 on 2 Open Ice Challenge’).
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September 22, 2013
Clive Thompson (b. 1968) is a Canadian freelance journalist, blogger and science and technology writer. Thompson graduated from the University of Toronto with majors in political science and English. He previously worked for ‘Canada’s Report on Business’ magazine and ‘Shift’ magazine, then became a freelance contributor for ‘The New York Times Magazine,’ ‘The Washington Post, and several other publications. He writes about digital technologies and their social and cultural impact
He started his science and technology blog, ‘Collision Detection,’ in 2002. Thompson lives in Brooklyn with his wife Emily Nussbaum who is the TV critic for ‘The New Yorker.’
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September 17, 2013
Human–robot interaction (HRI) is the study of interactions between humans and robots; it is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, design, and social sciences.
The basic goal of HRI is to define a general human model that could lead to principles and algorithms allowing more natural and effective interaction between humans and robots. Research ranges from how humans work with remote, tele-operated unmanned vehicles to peer-to-peer collaboration with anthropomorphic robots. Many in the field of HRI study how humans collaborate and interact and use those studies to motivate how robots should interact with humans.
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September 10, 2013
The Rally Fighter is the first automobile manufactured by Local Motors. The car is designed under a freely distributable Creative Commons license. It was featured in an episode of the American version of the television show ‘Top Gear.’
The Rally Fighter was also featured on the Discovery Channel television show ‘Game Changers’ showing the build process that customers who purchase a Rally Fighter would go through. The Rally Fighter is an automobile built by the customer at a Micro Factory owned and operated by Local Motors.
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September 5, 2013
In historiography (the study of historical methods) and the philosophy of history, progress (from Latin ‘progressus,’ ‘an advance’) is the idea that the world can become increasingly better in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, quality of life, etc.
Although progress is often associated with the Western notion of change in a straight, linear fashion, alternative conceptions exist, such as the cyclic theory of eternal return (the belief that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space), or the ‘spiral-shaped’ dialectic progress of Hegel, Marx, et al.
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