Daniel Rourke /stream

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The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated book…

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That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication…

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Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake…

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Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority of…

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Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either.…

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I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only…

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(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating…

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In November the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In preparation for the meeting, we were expected…

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Imagine standing in front of a robot, gazing into its wide, plastic eyes, and falling in love. Your heart revs up, and you hope this Other—this humanoid machine—turns your way again,…

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We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner…

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The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually…

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Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense quantity…

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It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived. An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth -…

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What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

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It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and…

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Want to learn how to make a computer go foom just by talking to it? Here's a step-by-step tutorial from the master himself, Captain Kirk. And below, we've got every scene…

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Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time: In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly…

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The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated book…

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It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850,…

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As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists. Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff,…

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Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority of…

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Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either.…

Bookmark

I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only…

Bookmark

(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating…

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What's the difference between a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster like "Terminator 2" and a hard-core porn film? Very little, claims novelist, essayist and footnote fetishist David Foster Wallace. 1990s moviegoers who have…

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In November the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In preparation for the meeting, we were expected…

Bookmark

The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually…

Bookmark

Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense quantity…

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It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived. An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth -…

Bookmark

What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

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Often thought of as a modern disease, cancer has always been with us. Where scientists disagree is on how much it has been amplified by the sweet and bitter fruits of…

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Want to learn how to make a computer go foom just by talking to it? Here's a step-by-step tutorial from the master himself, Captain Kirk. And below, we've got every scene…

Bookmark

Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time: In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly…