Early Warning Systems – Larry Brilliant

A thread over at the neXtPrize blog got me thinking about Early Warning systems–how mobile technologies like SMS can allow Twitter-like real-time monitoring of data for the purpose of discovering emerging disasters. Pragzz pointed me to a couple of non-profs that are already supporting this. Ushahadi (Swahili for 'testimony') is an Open Source platform that anyone can use to set up and manage monitoring campaigns.

The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa.

MobileActive.org is a community of people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact.

We are committed to increasing the effectiveness of NGOs around the world who recognize that the 3.5 billion mobile phones provide unprecedented opportunities for organizing, communications, and service and information delivery.

Their site also features a directory of NGOs who are using mobile phones to make a social impact.

Researching this reminded me of a Ted talk I'd heard by Larry Brilliant on the occasion of his winning a 2006 Ted Wish prize. Larry's wish was to build a better early warning system for monitoring the outbreak of dangerous disease. Larry knows of what he speaks- he led the WHO team that eradicated Smallpox. He also was a founding member of the Seva Foundation which has restored sight to hundreds of thousands. Based on the work previously done by GPHIN Larry launched InSTEDD which plans to amplify the data collection and monitoring capabilities of GPHIN a hundredfold. You can watch Larry's amazing Ted Talk and read a short history of the INSTEDD project here. Larry launched InSTEDD with the $100,000 Ted prize. It will be interesting to see what he can do with $1 billion as head of Google.org. Go Larry!

Larry Brilliant photo by JD Lasica
Larry Brilliant photo by JD Lasica

See Also: HealthMap.org
Update 022309: Larry departs Google.org to become "Google's Chief Philanthropy Evangelist".

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old Media on Hofmann's de-animation 1906-2008

this AM 30 Azid_Tao, 00,070 a.L. ( after LSDNATOM) . Saint Hofmann created LSD in Nov., 1938, so why not have this be the cusp of the change over of Epoch's? The most recent 10,000 year era ends and the New Epoch we are in starts with 00,001 for 1939? FERMI does the first nuclear pile in Dec. 1942. Hofmann discovers the effects of Azid_Tao in April , 1943….

and from the NYTimes this AM

April 30, 2008

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

PARIS – Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann's 1979 book "LSD: My Problem Child."

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. "It was a real paradise up there," he said in an interview in 2006. "We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood."

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

"It happened on a May morning – I have forgotten the year – but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden," he wrote in "LSD: My Problem Child." "As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

"It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security."

Though Dr. Hofmann's father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. "I said that I didn't believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and someone made the world," he said. "I had this very deep connection with nature."

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."

Dr. Hofmann's work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career and his spiritual quest.

"Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the animal and plant kingdom," Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. "I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us."

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind's place in nature and help curb society's ultimately self-destructive degradation of the natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD's properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz as head of the research department for natural medicines until his retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books

He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30hofmann.html?ref=world

UCLA event UpLoading wars 12:30 PM Design Media Arts

See poster for Theory Series Talks  

PETER LUNENFELD, THE SECRET WAR BETWEEN DOWNLOADING & UPLOADING

THEORY PROFESSOR CANDIDATE

 

April 24, 2008, 12:30 pm

Peter Lunenfeld works at the intersection of media philosophy, design theory, art criticism, and collaborative practice. His books include USER:InfoTechnoDemo (MIT, 2005), Snap to Grid (MIT, 2000), and The Digital Dialectic (ed., MIT, 1999). The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine is forthcoming. As creator and editorial director of the Mediawork project, he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT Press that  redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web.

 Peter's Site

WARK! a UCLA 22 April 12:30 PM talk followUP^!

Ken Wark gave a mind-blowin' talk yesterday at UCLA!  Hopefullly, video/audio should be available from D!MA archives. A Wonderful flow of jargon, tags, andnew categories!  Someday we will have tags here on our WordPress app! Wark mentioned WordPress more than once.See a piece here from his new book due out laterfrom Sit  

Game

Sunday, April 13
The Guy Debord that is best known is the one who is the author of The Society of the Spectacle, but in many ways it is not quite a representative text. Lately there has also been a revival of Debord the film maker, but here I want to think about Debord is a slightly different light. So I will discuss not so much his writing or his films, and still less his biography, but a game. Beside being a writer, a film maker, an editor, and a first rate professional of no profession, he was also, of all things, a game designer.http://totality.tv/2008/4/13/game  

MACKENZIE WARK, GAMER THEORY

THEORY PROFESSOR CANDIDATE

 

April 22, 2008, 12:30 pm       »  

McKenzie Wark is the author of Gamer Theory (Harvard UP), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP), and various other things.

http://www.dma.ucla.edu/events/calendar.php?ID=536

 

 

 

IRC interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Tuesday, April 15th, 8PM ET

media maven out of NYC    Join us tomorrow at 8PM Eastern as we hold a live discussion with author, teacher, and documentarian  Douglas Rushkoff  in the #boingboing IRC channel, to talk about some of the work he's doing to move his studies in a "'new' direction," to focus less on the tech/media sphere and towards the nature of money and corporatism  

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/14/irc-interview-with-d.html

 tags go along here?  

book: Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Digital Formations) by Jussi Parikka

by

image

x.

Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net

from

http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/trackback/

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual

Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka studied Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar in Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, in the Digital Formations series (2007). In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture and Media Archaeologies. Parikka's homepage is <http://users.utu.fi/juspar>.

Back to article.

book on amazon

Node magazine started based on William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country!

Listen to latest Gibson audio interview here

William Gibson

Listen to William Gibson
Part one (runs 13:16) | Part two (runs 17:03)

CBC Radio One site and info

 September 19, 2007

 

William Gibson Bookclub

This week on the podcast a special audio bookclub with award-winning author William Gibson.

fromhttp://www.nodemagazine.com/

WGibson

"Someone's already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in "˜Spook Country,' " [Gibson] said. "It's sort of scary." – Chris Watson, Bookends: William Gibson explores the science fiction of the here-and-now in his new novel [Santa Cruz Sentinel]

http://nodemagazine.com/

From

http://node.tumblr.com/ from

" "Someone has a website going where every single thing mentioned in Spook Country has a blog entry and usually an illustration so, every reference, someone has taken it, researched it and written a sort of little Wikipedia entry for it and all in the format of a website that pretends to be from a magazine called Node,

W. Gibson shows up in Second Life!

Constitution Day Program — Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering What happened to the 5th. Amendment?

Seton Hall Law CONSTITUTION DAY
September 17, 2007

Constitution Day will be held in the Law School Auditorium


Press Release (September 7, 2007)
Seton Hall School of Law on Second Life: Constitution Day Program on Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering to be Featured at Virtual Guantánamo Bay Detention Center [Read Press Release here]


Seton Hall Law School is pleased to offer you an outstanding simulcast program in celebration of Constitution Day on September 17, 2007. As you may recall, the 2006 Guantánamo Teach-In was an amazing success, with three hundred colleges, universities, medical schools, divinity schools and law schools participating. A DVD of the Guantánamo Teach-In program sponsored last year by Seton Hall Law School is available.

http://law.shu.edu/constitutionday/

Constitution Day Program — Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering

(To view this webcast, you must register a user name and password which you will be prompted for when
entering the event. If you haven't already registered, click here to REGISTER )
 
 
  Monday, September 17, 2007 01:30 PM EDT
Click Here For Your Local Time
Connect via Streaming
Audio/Video
 
 
  1:30 – 1:45pm EDT Welcome & Introductions
   
 
Professor Mark Denbeaux
  Seton Hall Law School
 
 
 
  1:45 – 2:00pm EDT FBI Interrogation Seeking
   
 
Mr. Jack Cloonan
  Clayton Consultants and Retired FBI Counter Terrorism Expert
 

http://event.netbriefings.com/event/seton/Live/constitutionday/

Why texting harms your IQ

From The Times
April 22, 2005

Txts n emails mk ppl stupid coz they R worse than smking pot & lead 2 a st8 of 'infomania'

By Michael Horsnell
THE regular use of text messages and e-mails can lower the IQ more than twice as much as smoking marijuana.

That is the claim of psychologists who have found that tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking them for electronic messages temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user's IQ.

This rate of decline in intelligence compares unfavourably with the four-point drop in IQ associated with smoking marijuana, according to British researchers, who have labelled the fleeting phenomenon of enhanced stupidity as "infomania".

Research on sleep deprivation suggests that the IQ drop caused by electronic obsession is also equivalent to a wakeful night.
more…

One Cubic Mile of Oil

Very interesting article over on Wired with a diagram that puts our energy consumption in perspective. Wow! Now I understand what Michael is talking about when he says the singularity has already happened and it was cheap oil. And I get a much better idea of the gloom and doom side of oil depletion Robin's talking about. Humans consume 1 cubic mile of oil a year and as an example from the Wired chart- the equivalent is 52 Diablo Canyon sized Nuclear Power Plants running for 50 years!!!