“Finally in Italy there won’t be the need to pick a plane and traverse an ocean to attend the nearest O’Reilly conference!”
Frontiers of Interaction is organized by my friend Leandro, and I have been lucky enough to go to two of the previous editions. They have been of a consistently high quality. My speech for this year is shaping up nicely, and I hope that it will be up to the expectations of the attendees!
With help from Google, and NASA, the Singularity University is being unveiled today. Founded by Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Diamandis, the objective of the Singularity University is that of preparing humanity to best face its challenges, using the tools that the accelerating technological change makes possible. These tools don’t emerge spontaneously from the background noise of economic or scientific activities: they have to be actively pursued, and sometimes are the application of the intersection of apparently distant fields. These interdisciplinary approaches characterize the curriculum of the Singularity University, which will start offering its nine week graduate program this summer.
On top of this extensive course, there will be also ten day, and three day intensive executive courses for industry managers and CxOs, who will be able to recognize the important trends analyzed during the lectures, and apply them to the planning, and execution of their companies’ strategies.
The opportunities that the Singularity University offers for getting a glimpse into what the leading developments are in a variety of advanced fields are unique, as well as the networking, and potential formation of startups ready to be funded by the institutions corporate sponsors.
Learning is such a fundamental activity for today’s world, which changes fast around us! Adapting to these dynamic conditions cannot be just a question of biological, genetic evolution. That also happens, of course, but its ways are much too slow for us to wait and let them catch up. Our culture, and its technological applications, have an impact in the day to day activities of each of us, and we have to make sure that we are equipped to face the challenges that are posed by them. Even new ways of learning, and new ways of thinking can be necessary, and applying techniques that are adept in finding the right connections between different fields, and different methods, can lead to unexpectedly effective results.
It hasn’t been reported by the numerous articles covering the announcement of the Singularity University, but Ray confirmed to me, and it is rather important, that all the lectures, and the course materials that are going to be developed and delivered at its sessions are going to be made available online under a liberal license. This is going to be equivalent to or more liberal than the license applied to the Open Courseware Consortium’s content, of which famously MIT’s courses are also a part. This means that all the materials of the Singularity University are going to be published under Creative Commons Attribution license!
Bruce Sterling and Bruno Argento are at it again, this time from the pages of SEED magazine, with an article entitled “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic“, spreading their peculiar mix of breathless future, whose well worn form is tinted with skepticism and where the Utopian views thread together with a reality where the probabilities turn into daily demonstrations of human nature’s unchangeable basics.
They list several new sources of dread which—after the original source of the global financial crisis, that hasn’t still boiled over, and taken a manageable form in new institutions and new rules—have the power of rattling the human soul and its confidence in the power of reason to command nature: climate, intellectual property, national currencies, insurance and building codes, the elderly, the Westphalian system, science.
I am an optimist. It is a choice, since from the point of view of an objective analysis there is nothing to be optimistic about in the Universe. What you love, what you strive to achieve is going die, end, crumble, and likely be forgotten soon after, without anybody to remember why it was even worth caring for it, why it was even worth trying. So my choice of being an optimist is not based on this. It is based on looking around me, and realizing that I only have one way of living life, and it is a way of my own choosing. If I wanted I could live as a pessimist, and—at least for a little while, until I decided against it—even as a nihilist. But it won’t be fun. It won’t be constructive. So I believe, in a pragmatic, operational way, that it is better to found my outlook on positive values.
I am also an atheist. I have a naturalistic worldview, which does not include mystical, or supernatural elements. (This doesn’t mean a lot of things, for example that I am amoral, or that my view is exclusively mechanistic.) A few years ago a new movement has been started by Richard Dawkins, who felt it would be good to find a new way of describing people like me. We are the Brights! (The people who on the other hand feel that they have a need to include the supernatural, or the divine in their world are the Supers, not the Dims.)
I often descibe myself as a missionary atheist. Yes, I am out to convert you too, so don’t be surprised if after dinner, contrary to many social conventions, I start to talk about religion, and the need to relinquish it!
So to a bright future, somewhat unreasonably so, but optimistically!
Tomorrow I will be speaking at the Parliament in Rome about Internet technologies, starting from the Obama victory, and how it as able to knit together a series of tools with very effective results. At La Sala Delle Colonne of the Chamber Of Deputies, there will be an open session, with a conversation between Marco Montemagno, Antonio Palmieri, Paolo Gentiloni, Enrico Menduni, Antonio Sofi, Edoardo Colombo, and me, with about 100 additional people in the audience, who will hopefully be very active too.
Since the founding meeting of the Open Government Working Group a year ago I was hopeful that an opportunity would arise to attempt at sharing my views with professional politicians. At this time there will be from both the right, and the left, and I really am looking forward to understand their views.
There were a couple of frightening news today:
Italy is the only country among 30 surveyed by Eurostat, where Internet usage among families declined between 2007 and 2008 (from 43% penetration, already very low, to 42%)
the Italian Prime Minister declared that he will propose at the next G8 meeting the adoption of an agenda item for the worldwide regulation of the Internet
Part of what I will try to communicate tomorrow, is that the Internet is not just an excellent electoral tool; it is not just an additional channel for parties and governments to communicate. It is also a fundamental new platform for citizens to participate in the acts of government, transparently, and efficiently.
We are just at the beginning of a long, but necessary road for the thorough adoption of Internet technologies for government, politics, and civic life in general.
Have you been wondering what present to give me for coming festivities?
I want to help you: an iPhone 3G!
Well, not an entire iPhone really. That would either be too expensive, or if more than one person decided that, yes, actually they wanted to give me an iPhone as a gift, then I’d end up with more than one… So what I propose is that you choose a share of an iPhone!
I am going to use an unlocked one, with my current SIM (a pretty good contract from 3, which gives me plenty of talk time, but even more, 5GB of data traffic per week), which means that it is not going to be cheap, but I am dividing it in 20 parts, of €30.
What do you think? :)
If you like the idea, then click on the donation button below. (Hey, you can give me more than one share too…) You will be sent to a PayPal page, where you can confirm the amount, and tell me if you do not want to be openly recognized for this (the default is public…). You can use PayPal even if you are not a member, and you will not be forced to sign-up.
I will update this page, and obviously stop the button when the thirty pieces of the iPhone have been all taken.
Have you been stuck sometime to try and spice up your presentations with good images to make them more appealing? You don’t have to resort to the lame basic clip arts that came with your presentation program. These are so common, that their value, the interest that they generate in your audience is really minimal.
Of course there are different styles of presentation. Some people do not use images at all, and their presentations are all text, with a lot of bullet-points, sentences, paragraphs covering each slide. They tend even to read aloud from these slides. I do not subscribe to that school of presentations.
My preference is much more towards what is called the Lessig-style. This involves the use of many slides, each of them shown for only a few seconds, with very few words, one, or even no words, just an image. The reason I like presentations like this is because I believe that people should listen to you while you are talking. They should not read on screen what you are about to say. They should follow your voice, and what they see should be a complement to that. A good image is great in my opinion, because the cognitive clues that it gives do not interfere with listening.
You can find my presentations online at Slideshare. Take a look: many are also turned into a slidecast, by putting in sync the audio as well.
Apparently my presentation style has been positively perceived enough that I have received often the question: “How do you find these good images for your presentations?”
It is actually easier than it appears, and it perfectly suits my natural laziness. The process is the following:
Organizing the ideas. I break down the topic I have to talk about in three-four main parts, and then break those down again in smaller and smaller parts, until I get to the minimal units. These will be typically two or three sentences in the speech.
Representing them with a few words, a category, or an emotion. I will try to find a single representative expression of that idea. Not necessarily what is going to be said, or what is written on the presentation slide (remember that is also just one word, or a few).
Search online for those words, and pick the favorite picture.
My preferred source of pictures is Flickr. I also store my own photos there, even if it seldom occurs to me to pick one of my own photos for my presentations. The reasons I like Flickr are manyfold, but here is why it helps a lot to find good images for your presentations:
It has a very good search option, with advanced search parameters
You can sort the result by relevance, or Flickr’s own interestingness value, which works well to bring cool photos to your attention
I can restrict the search to the photos I can freely use by their license.
This last point is fundamental! Flickr supports Creative Commons licensing of the photos. What this means is that the artist uploading the photo, while retaining copyright, can automatically and without further consultation or negotiation, give certain rights to users of those photos. There are several types of Creative Commons license options. I choose to search for those photos that enable me to use them commercially, and which I can modify. This is one of the most liberal licenses: Creative Commons Attribution, or CC-A. I myself publish almost everything with this same license.
This means that when you find a photo you like, with the CC-A license, you can take it modify it, include it in your presentation, or for that matter in your book, movie, or any other derivative work, and as long as you give attribution to the original artist who took the photo, you are done. I put this attribution in the bottom right of each slide (in the past I used to put the credits on an extra slide in the back of the slide deck, but I changed. Maybe I will change again in the future, we’ll see.). Your presentation can be given for free, or you can ask for a fee, or you can even sell the videos that you make with the presentations. The value of the images will enhance them enormously. Your are not obliged to tell the artists whose pictures you took anything, but they might appreciate a note, or a comment on their photo page. But do not ask for permission up-front! That would really spoil the advantage that CC-A gave you and the artist up front, since individually approving of each use is what the license is there to avoid to start with.
So I hope this helps you find good pictures for your presentations! The next natural step would be to turn this text itself into a presentation… and maybe that is what I will do.
Tomorrow in San Jose, under the tagline “Opportunity, Risk, Leadership”, the 2008 Singularity Summit will explore the state of AGI research, and implementation, and discuss the visions of the leading thinkers of the field of accelerating technological change, and its impact on society.
The Summit is not going to be streamed live, but the videos from it should be soon online. In the meantime you can follow it on Twitter in realtime.
Today was the day of the Emerging Technology Workshops, and tomorrow will be the day of the conference proper.
Science fiction writers always knew that they shaped reality. It was only reality’s fault if it was unable to give at any given point substance to their dreams. Playing catchup, reality was recently able to dispel some of the feeling of betrayed nostalgia that many of us had for the despicable lack of interplanetary travel, robots, and other classical scifi fare around us. Especially information technology, computers, and the internet, unsurprisingly lacking in so much of the novels and short stories of the golden years’ production, gave us the breathless sensation of speed that Futurism really worshiped at the start of the 20th century.
Probably this belief in being a shaper of worlds, the universe, and more, the multiverse, which had Bruce Sterling, one of the top practitioners of his art, summon up his Italian twin brother Bruno Argento. Bruce spoke about Bruno at other conferences already, but we have never met him. Bruno is actually more than Bruce’s twin brother. Bruno IS Bruce from an other Universe.
We have never met Bruno Argento, but this will soon change. Bruce can’t participate at a conference where he was invited to speak, and has asked Bruno to go instead! Tomorrow, as he visits our Universe at the ICOGRADA Design Week’s Multiverse conference in the Torino Design Capital Of The World event series, Bruno Argento will speak about all the issues concerning him.
I was speaking this week at SHiFT08 in Lisbon. This conference has been put together by a group of volunteers led by Pedro Custodio, with passion, joy, and a lot of creativity.
For smaller, and relatively isolated markets like Portugal, these are excellent, and very important opportunities to make sure that their startup culture is nurtured, and that the entrepreneurs behind them are put in touch with the ease, and the intensity needed with some of the protagonists of the changes sweeping through the larger web world.
I am an optimist. It is a choice, since from the point of view of an objective analysis there is nothing to be optimistic about in the Universe. What you love, what you strive to achieve is going die, end, crumble, and likely be forgotten soon after, without anybody to remember why it was even worth caring for it, why it was even worth trying. So my choice of being an optimist is not based on this. It is based on looking around me, and realizing that I only have one way of living life, and it is a way of my own choosing. If I wanted I could live as a pessimist, and—at least for a little while, until I decided against it—even as a nihilist. But it won’t be fun. It won’t be constructive. So I believe, in a pragmatic, operational way, that it is better to found my outlook on positive values.
