Clay Shirky expresses some very powerful ideas about the demise of newspapers and traditional publishing [Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable at Clay Shirky]:

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The main thesis of the article is that the business models underlying print-based news are completely unsustainable, and newspapers are being kept alive solely by institutional inertia.

Shirky notes that the new content production models visible at the moment involve unremunerated writing and publishing produced by loose collections of enthusiastic amateurs:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The new model of journalism seems to have some worrying characteristics. Investigative journalism in the Woodward and Bernstein mould may be an idealistic model, but it was possible because of resources which might only be available to large institutions: teams of lawyers, a newspaper’s own political weight, institutional access to data etc. Investigations into the activities of large transnational bodies need to be supported by the tactical resources enabling them to withstand legal, financial and paramilitary defense mechanisms. It seems hopelessly romantic to imagine that networks of enthusiastic amateurs could achieve what the ideal models of investigative journalism seem to achieve. The new models look capable of producing vast amounts of shallow scrutiny, but they risk disabling the kinds of journalism that gave journalism what good name it has.

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Graphical score for Gyorgy Ligeti’s electronic composition, ‘Artikulation’. The score was composed in 1958. The graphical score was produced by Rainer Wehinger twelve years after the original music was recorded. A video of the score accompanying the music is available on dailymotion.
[Radassemmbly via information aesthetics]

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MIT’s Technology Review reports on the development of a technique designed to prevent the damage caused by the metals in current neural interfaces, where ‘insertion of the rigid metal electrode into soft tissue triggers a cascade of inflammatory signals, damaging or killing neurons and triggering a scar to form around the metal’ [Technology Review].

“We hope to come up with a way to communicate across the scar layer and send information to and from the device in a way that is as friendly as possible,” says David Martin, a materials scientists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who is leading the research into the polymer coatings.

Martin and his collaborators coat the electrodes with an electrically conductive polymer originally developed for electronic devices, such as organic LEDs and photovoltaics for solar cells. The polymer coating increases the surface area of the metal-biological interface, which in turn boosts performance of the electrode.

Along with former lab members, Martin founded a company, Massachusetts-based Biotectix, to commercialize the materials developed in his lab. He says that he is already in talks with a cochlear-implant technology company about using his lab’s materials in their devices. [Technology Review]

[Technology Review via Technovelgy]

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The momentum of ostalgie grows. I particularly enjoyed k-punk’s comparison between Mark E. Smith’s autobiography, Renegade, and David Peace’s The Damned Utd - a novel concerned, in particular, with the character of the football manager, Brian Clough. k-punk concludes his article attacking the short-termism of neo-liberalism and re-enchanting the era of the cold war:

The puffed-up patricians who hounded Clough out of Derby have long since been replaced on the boards of football clubs by bland accountants representing corporate interests or pharaonic figures with vast personal capital available for potlach. The continuous upheaval of post Fordism has destroyed the long term in football, as everywhere else. In a perfect reflection of the general situation after thirty years of neoliberalism, the rich clubs have become richer, more remote, impervious. Derby, Forest or some other small club winning the Premiership is unthinkable. The grim Seventies - the Eastern Bloc as an era - has become a time of fairy tales. [k-punk]

An image of the architecture of Eastern Bloc fairy tails was serendipitously supplied by Frédéric Chaubin’s photography of future-orientated architecture in the old Soviet Union [pingmag]:

According to PingMag, Frederic Chaubin, chief editor of a French magazine, Citizen K, is considering a book about Soviet Architecture from the 1970s and 1980s.

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BBC News have reported on the imminent commercial release of Emotiv’s neural interface. According to the article,

The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game. [BBC News]

The article also reported that,

Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in “strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds”

Paul Ledak, vice president, IBM Digital Convergence said brain computer interfaces, like the Epoc headset were an important component of the future 3D Internet and the future of virtual communication. [BBC News]

…

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Li Gong of the Ohio State University School of Communication has published research concluding that virtual sales people are more effective when they smile:

…the happy agent achieved greater consumption intent, more positive product evaluation, more positive attitudes towards the agent (in terms of liking, trustworthiness, and competence) and the Web-site interface, and more positive user experience than the sad agent. [Gong 2007:188]

Gong, L. (2007)”Is happy better than sad even if they are both non-adaptive? Effects of emotional expressions of talking-head interface agents”. International Journal of Human-Computer Interactions 65(3) pp183-191 doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.09.005 [Accessed via ScienceDirect]

[via Science Daily]

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The international space station caught up with operations that had been delayed since the 2003 Columbia accident. Despite the questionable scientific value, the ISS is still a staggering engineering accomplishment.

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The Artifort F978, designed by Geoffrey Harcourt in 1968, has been re-released. Artifort attempted to make well-designed furniture cheap and accessible. One of their manufacturing strategies involved using an old cider press to manufacture some of their pressed-plywood furniture.

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I know nothing about cars - but I do remember from my 1970’s Top Trumps: Prototypes that this is the Ferrari Modulo designed by Pininfarina. I also remember that it was a V12, 5 litre thing and could, apparently, travel at 360 kph. If we had seen Dr. Frank Poole going about his business on earth - it would have been in one of these.

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In a development reminiscent of Dr Strangelove, attempts are underway to develop weapons capable of destroying underground facilities up to 300 feet beneath rock.

As we watch the slow-motion failure of attempts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons strategic planning is increasingly dredging its archives for ideas belonging to the Cold War. Defense Tech describe the new generation of ‘bunker busting’ weapons, ending their article:

“I’ve been advised that the Deep Digger program is undergoing a ‘security review’. If past experience is anything to go by, this means you won’t be hearing any more news updates on the program.” [Source: Defense Tech]

The article describes a several of technologies designed to either hammer or drill their way closer to their targets. Once underground shockwaves are their modus operandi. Using this technique greater damage can be done than by nuclear weapons:

For a penetration depth of three meters and a yield of 0.3 kilotons, the B61-11 could destroy a target buried under roughly 15 meters [= 50 feet] of hard rock or concrete. For the same penetration depth and the maximum yield of 340 kilotons, the destruction depth would be roughly 70 meters [ =210 feet ] for a hardened target. [Original Source:Union of Concerned Scientists]

The strategic logic embedded in these developments is the clearest possibile indicator of what is at stake in the attempts to revive nuclear non-proliferation.

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