May 11, 2012
Infornography is a portmanteau of ‘information’ and ‘pornography’ used to define an addiction to or an obsession with acquiring, manipulating, and sharing information. People ‘suffering’ from infornography enjoy receiving, sending, exchanging, and digitizing information.
The definition (without explicitly using the term itself) is also greatly applied in many cyberpunk settings, where information can almost be considered a currency of its own, in a sense facilitating the development of an alternate world for ‘escapism.’ Megacorps, hackers, and other kinds of people use information to thrive; they can subtly be called infornographers.’
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May 9, 2012
The concept of geoengineering (or climate intervention) refers to the deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that geoengineering options, such as ocean fertilization to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, remained largely unproven. It was judged that reliable cost estimates for geoengineering had not yet been published.
Geoengineering accompanies Mitigation and Adaptation to form a three-stranded ‘MAG’ approach to tackling global warming, notably advocated by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Some geoengineering techniques are based on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), including direct methods (e.g. carbon dioxide air capture) and indirect methods (e.g. ocean iron fertilization). These techniques can be regarded as mitigation of global warming.
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May 8, 2012
The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by American educator Salman Khan (who has three degrees from MIT (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
With the stated mission of ‘providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere,’ the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,100 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, microeconomics, and computer science.
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May 4, 2012
In computer security, the dancing pigs problem (also known as the dancing bunnies problem) is a statement on user attitudes to computer security: that users primarily desire features without considering security, and so security must be designed in without the computer having to ask a technically ignorant user.
The term has its origin in a remark by computer scientists Edward Felten and Gary McGraw: ‘Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.’
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May 4, 2012
The cute cat theory of digital activism is a theory concerning Internet activism, Web censorship, and ‘cute cats’ (a term used for any low-value, but popular online activity) developed in 2008 by Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media. It posits that most people are not interested in activism; instead, they want to use the web for mundane activities, including surfing for pornography and lolcats (‘cute cats’).
The tools that they develop for that, however, are very useful to social movement activists, who often lack resources to develop dedicated tools themselves, but instead, use the tools developed by others (such as Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, and similar platforms), even though such tools were not originally intended for activism.
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May 3, 2012
A 64k intro is a demo (a non-interactive multimedia presentation) where the size of the executable file is limited to 65,536 bytes. At demo parties there is a category for this kind of demo. 64k intros generally apply many techniques to be able to fit in the given size, usually including procedural generation, sound synthesis, and executable compression.
The size of 64 kilobytes is a traditional limit which was inherited from the maximum size of a COM file. An intro originally referred to an endless demo where all the action happened on a single graphical screen, often to promote a BBS or a game crack. Nowadays it can refer to any demo written within a strict size limit, such as 4 kB or 64 kB.
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May 3, 2012
The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks which features in a number of science fiction novels and works of short fiction by him, collectively called the Culture series.
The Culture is characterized by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.
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May 3, 2012
Excession, first published in 1996, is Scottish writer Iain M. Banks’s fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture (a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society). It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture’s Minds (AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power.
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April 29, 2012
In marketing terminology, a killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, or an operating system. One of the first examples of a killer application is generally agreed to be the ‘VisiCalc’ spreadsheet for the Apple II. The machine was purchased in the thousands by finance workers on the strength of this program.
The definition of ‘killer app’ came up during Bill Gates’s questioning in the ‘United States v. Microsoft’ antitrust suit. Gates had written an email in which he described ‘Internet Explorer’ as a killer app. In the questioning, he said that the term meant ‘a very popular application,’ and did not connote an application that would fuel sales of a larger product or one that would supplant its competition.
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April 28, 2012
A disruptive innovation creates a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
By contrast, a ‘sustaining innovation’ does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other’s sustaining improvements; they may be either ‘discontinuous’ (i.e. ‘transformational’ or ‘revolutionary’) or ‘continuous’ (i.e. ‘evolutionary’).
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April 27, 2012
Planetary Resources, Inc., formerly known as Arkyd Astronautics, is a company formed in 2010, and reorganized and renamed with considerable fanfare in 2012. Their stated goal is to ‘expand Earth’s natural resource base’ by developing and deploying the technologies for asteroid mining. Although the long-term goal of the company is to mine asteroids, its initial plans call for developing a market for small (30–50 kg) cost-reduced space telescopes for both Earth observation and astronomy.
These spacecraft would employ a laser-optical system for ground communications, reducing payload bulk and mass compared to conventional RF antennae. The deployment of such orbital telescopes is envisioned as the first step forward in the company’s asteroid mining ambitions. The same telescope satellite capabilities that Planetary Resources hopes to sell to customers can be used to survey and intensively examine near-earth asteroids.
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April 26, 2012
Vocaloid is a singing synthesizer. Its signal processing part was developed through a joint research project led by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain in 2000. Backed by the Yamaha Corporation it was developed into a commercial product, which was first released in 2004. The software enables users to synthesize singing by typing in lyrics and melody. It uses synthesizing technology with specially recorded vocals of voice actors or singers. A piano roll type interface is used to input the melody and the lyrics can be entered on each note. The software can change the stress of the pronunciations, add effects such as vibrato, or change the dynamics and tone of the voice.
Each Vocaloid is sold as ‘a singer in a box’ designed to act as a replacement for an actual singer. The software was originally only available in English and Japanese, but as of Vocaloid 3, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean have been added. The software is intended for professional musicians as well as light computer music users and has so far sold on the idea that the only limits are the users’ own skills. Japanese musical groups Livetune and Supercell have released their songs featuring Vocaloid as vocals. Japanese record label Exit Tunes of Quake Inc. also have released compilation albums featuring Vocaloids. Artists such as Mike Oldfield have also used Vocaloids within their work for back up singer vocals and sound samples.
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