SXSW 2011: The internet is over

If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it's about everything. Web 3.0 The game layer The dictator's dilemma The road to that end state won't be smooth.

Greenpeace UK SXSW 2011: The Year of the Librarian - Phoebe Connelly - Technology Tech for tech's sake is over. In a year when social media is helping inform our coverage of everything from political upheaval in the Middle East to the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan, your app better do something more than be cool. I kept coming back to the librarians as I talked to people at SXSWi because this micro-track mirrored what I saw tweeted and written about the conference as a whole. I met with Justin Grimes, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Maryland who has done significant work on open government standards, and works with the formidable Carl Malamud on digitizing federal archives. There was, by my count, a panel or a meet-up showcasing librarians every day of this year's SXSWi. As always, the question of the social web loomed large at this year's SXSWi. But maybe we want to constrain the data that's available about ourselves. Image: Austin Convention Center, Eric Uhlir.

Discover the doomsday seed vault's secrets (NaturalNews) Are you aware of the Arctic Circle Doomsday Seed Vault? Technically it's the Svalbard International Seed Vault. The media has hailed it as an attempt to create a doomsday ark containing a wide variety of seeds to ensure the future of agriculture in the event of widespread crop disasters. A closer look behind the curtains finds some suspicious characters heavily vested in the vault's activity.The doomsday seed vault is situated on the island of Spitzbergen, Norway, located in the Svalbard island group within the Arctic Circle. It is considered a safety deposit box back up for all other seed banks located throughout the world, of which there are many. Norway technically owns the vault, and endows those who place seeds into the vault with absolute ownership and access of the seeds. An earlier LA Times article mentioned that all seeds are accepted, except for genetically modified seeds. Engdahl suspects something is rotten in Svalbard. Sources for this article include:

SXSW: The Fate of Libraries Carson Block, who gave a SXSW Interactive talk on Saturday titled “The Great Library Swindle,” says that he’s passionate about libraries and technology. But he didn’t really need to tell his audience that. The intensity of his interest was very much on display during his talk, which was about the daunting challenges that public libraries face in the age of the Internet and digitization. I knew it was ugly out there, but I wasn’t aware of all the details until Block went through them. Libraries are eager to jump aboard the e-book bandwagon, but major publishers such as Random House, Macmillan and Penguin are crimping their plans in multiple ways, including hiking prices, placing limits on lending policies or simply refusing to sell e-books to libraries at all. “I’m not sure why publishers are so afraid of libraries,” he said. The companies determining the future of book distribution are what Block called “the personal content superstores,” Amazon.com, Apple and Barnes & Noble.

Vidéo Mouvement perpetuel de fidjie (Musique - fidjie L'accès au service, strictement réservé à un public légalement majeur, propose un contenu à caractère érotique, pouvant heurter la sensibilité d'un public non averti. Je certifie sur l'honneur : être majeur(e) selon la loi en vigueur dans mon pays, que les lois de mon Etat m'autorisent à consulter ce service, être informé(e) du caractère érotique du contenu du service, consulter ce service à titre personnel sans impliquer de quelque manière que ce soit une société privée ou un organisme public. Par conséquent, je m'engage à : J'ai lu attentivement les paragraphes ci-dessus et formalise mon accord avec ce qui précède en cliquant sur le bouton [J'ACCEPTE] afin d'accéder au service.

Society for Scientific Exploration Important Lessons Photoshop Users Can Learn From Motion Graphic Artists I have during my time in school had the privilege to work in both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects. Having worked in both these applications has given me useful knowledge about how to work more efficiently. Practices used in Photoshop can be translated to something similar in After Effects and vise versa. Today I will illustrate 3 practices the other way around — from After Effects to Photoshop: Compositing and InstantiationLet the Software Do the Work for YouToggling Variations Compositing and Instantiation When working with video you usually make up the video by combining or “compositing” elements to create scenes. Can you find any composited elements in this video? Personally I think people are not compositing enough because of old habits, maybe you are used in working in a certain way. How to Make Good Use of Compositing in Photoshop First of all, this technique can only be applied in Photoshop CS2 (9.0) and more recent versions. Instead of merging, use a Smart Object. Google+

Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History: Amazon.fr: Staughton Lynd, Andrej Grubacic: Livres anglais et étrangers Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination: Amazon.fr: David Graeber: Livres anglais et étrangers Jack L. Snyder - Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of War - International Organization 56:1 [Access article in PDF] Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of War Jack Snyder The end of the Cold War has given rise to hopes among many international relations scholars and public activists that a dramatic transformation in world politics is now unfolding. Those who foresee substantial opportunities to transform the war-prone international system into a realm governed by benign norms contend that "anarchy is what states make of it." 2 In their view, culture, defined as shared knowledge or symbols that create meaning within a social group, determines whether behavior in the absence of a common governing authority is bloody or benign. This is a debate of compelling intellectual and practical import. However, some of the leading voices in this debate, both in academic and broader public settings, overlook the decisive interplay between situational constraints and the creation of culture. Testing the Effects of Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of War War Anarchy