matt's blog

Looking at the papers yesterday I realised that folly still has a long way to go educating some key "decision-makers" about the possibilities of the digitali age. This story was in The Sun newspaper:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/17/judge_website_shocker/

Amazing that anybody - particularly an "apparently" well-educated person with so much power over other people's lives - doesn't know how to download netsites on the interwebs.  

I could barely resist http://www.uselessaccount.com/create/
Says alot about the rigmaroles we put ourselves through in internet culture...

An art project from Brisbane Creative

Matt, folly Communications Manager

I thought this was an interesting article: http://www.housebuildersupdate.co.uk/2007/02/how-green-is-my-mac.html
saying that if you take into account the embodied energy used in making it, the average Mac (and presumably the average PC...) uses more like an equivalent of 300-400 watts per hour, as opposed to the 60 watts my laptop is rated at.

Better make good use of them then! And of course consider a green electricity tariff.
I'll leave Phil to comment on the energy-saving potential of certain other operating systems...

A new article by free-market "The Globalisation Institute" says that free laptops for children are "the very worst idea in international development". I couldn't disagree more.

One Lap Top Per Child is a ground-breaking new scheme to give free laptops to every child in developing countries. The laptops have been tailor-made from scratch for the purpose, the early versions including a hand-wound crank to actually power the thing. I found this article entitled "Leave computers to the market economy" to be the antithesis of folly's Free and Open Sourcei Software (FOSS) approach:

"Leave computers to the market economy"

As one critic, speaking in favour of the competitive market taking its course, points out: "Even if the laptops fail, they've forced Microsoft to respond to the competition by offering developing countries a better deal. Competition at its finest."

Check out the One Laptop Per Child main site here

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=220

This hilarious artwork presented here by Furtherfield showcases poignantly what I can only conclude is the outrageously exploitative practice of paying people a pittance for "Human Intelligence Tasks", such as on Amazon's Mechanical Turk "service"
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

In this service, mugs (or alternatively the poor) are asked to, say, write a review on their blogi of a watch repair shop in London. In this example, the workers were instructed precisely what "plugs" to give and precisely the URLS with the precise anchor words. The fee for this specific task was $1.00.

In The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin, the "participants"/workers' average wage was $0.69 an hour.

Interesting as an experiment for art, but as reviewer Rob Myers says "This is a possible nightmare future of affective labour and of art. Be paid a few cents to rhyme two lines or to sketch a cup....  McJobs do not provide long-term-employment, a decent wage, or a stepping stone to a better job."...

It seems now you can have your DNA sampled and turned into a lovely painting to hang above your bed...!
http://www.dna11.com/gallery_portraits.asp

At least it's more plausible than the world's first robotic cat
http://www.baekdal.com/future/intelliau/

The ultimate Virtuali Creature.

Until I found these robotic cats, which seem definitely scarily real...

Amazing. Early days maybe, but amazing.

This desk-top "printer" prints 3D objects... albeit it with a limited range of materials, so far.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2044607,00.html

The inventors make the grand claim that: "I think that within 10 years private individuals will be able to make for themselves virtually any manufactured product that is today sold by industry. I sometimes wonder if politicians realise that the entire basis of the human economy is about to undergo the biggest change since the invention of money."