“In just five years, the driverless experience will be activated by the touch of a button,” said Amnon Shashua, the chief technology officer of Mobileye.
Source: BMW promises fully driverless cars by 2021 – Jul. 1, 2016
Sony, Samsung, and Alphabet want to get right in your eyeballs. The tech firms have made public movements that appear to see contact lenses as one of the future interaction mediums. For taking pictures, video streaming, and measuring health signs, there may be solid reasoning behind sticking a computer in your eye.
Source: Sony, Samsung, and Alphabet Are Making Wearable Contact Lens Computers | Inverse
We have implemented an access platform that can support a wide variety of wireless network standards, from 2G and LTE to Wi-Fi access points. Anyone can customize the platform to meet their connectivity needs and set up the network of their choosing, in both rural and urban areas. For instance, the system, due to its on-board computing and storage capacity, can be configured as network-in-a-box or purely as a cellular access point.
Source: Introducing OpenCellular: An open source wireless access platform | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code
Here’s the slides from the panel I put together for the American Library Association Annual conference 2016 that featured Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Ranti Junus, and Emily Clasper. Huge fun, really great response. Below the slides are a Storify of the tweets from the presentation…it’s a good representation of the discussion during our hour.
Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping put this together!
Categories
OpenArchive
Sitting in the Internet Archive Great Room (see photo above for reference…yes, it’s in an old church….) I’m reminded that I never pushed out the link to the amazing new app that was created in part by my friend Nathan, available now for Android and coming soon for iOS that allows you to use the Internet Archive like your own personal Instagram:
and because Nathan and his group are awesome, the app is also open source:
and finally, direct link to the Google Play store for the app.
I’ve not seen an easier way to add photos to the Internet Archive directly than this app, and it’s got some really fantastic side benefits..the primary one being that it works transparently over Orbot if you’d like, so that uploads and connections can be driven over the Tor network without any extra effort on the user’s part.
UPDATE
The Guardian Project just posted their own announcement for the app. Their take on it is also timely since I’m spending this week at the Decentralized Web Summit:
We see this as a first step towards a more distributed, decentralized way of managing and sharing your personal media, and publishing it and synchronizing it to different places and people, in different ways.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, writing, and editing in the last few months that all revolved around libraries and the future of the Internet. It seems more and more obvious to me that there’s an opportunity for libraries as participants in the growing number of decentralized services on the Internet. These services are multiplying, and it seems to me that the future of communication is likely to be a better one if distributed services were more normalized on the Internet.
I’ve decided to share two essays about this topic. The first is
How Libraries Can Save the Internet of Things from the Web’s Centralized Fate over at BoingBoing, which is the highly edited and polished version of the much longer A Special Obligation to the Future over on Medium. Normally I wouldn’t share two similar pieces, but I feel like the shorter BoingBoing essay is the compressed and focused “official” version and there were things that I liked about the longer, more emotive original. So I’m sharing both here, and you can comment on, share, and critique either or both as you’d like.
I’m hoping these serve as conversation starters, and possibly as inflection points for thinking about the future of libraries in terms of their role as pillars of democracy and freedom. I’m going to be doing more work on this topic, speaking and writing and organizing over the next several months. If you’re interested in helping out and lending a hand, let me know.
And if you’re interested in decentralization in general, I highly recommend checking out Yochai Benkler’s work, especially Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power. Also recommended is Phil Windley’s Decentralization is Hard, Maybe Too Hard.
They are both right, decentralization is amazingly difficult to pull off. This is why it needs help in the form of library infrastructure, political capital, and skills.
Thanks especially to David Weinberger, who was instrumental in both the conception and the editing of this piece. Also thanks to everyone who read and commented on the piece as it developed, you are all awesome.
I attended my first SXSW conference this past week, and have been struggling about how to describe it. On one hand, I was able to find interesting things and have a great time. On the other, the conference felt so very desperate, like a marketing team and a brogrammer had a kid. It was a non-stop barrage of things that were really-well-known being well-known (Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot) and things that weren’t well-known trying desperately to be so.
Libraries and librarians were, as always, the saving grace in the midst of the chaos. I spent time with the Library IdeaDrop house this year, and all I can say is that they run a tight ship, full of interesting people and awesome events. I would be a part of it again in a heartbeat.
I wrote up my experiences for American Libraries, here’s the three-part story:
- South by Southwest Interactive, Day One
- South by Southwest Interactive, Day Two
- South by Southwest Interactive, Day Three
And here are all the interviews that I did with IdeaDrop this year:
SESSION 6 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
Jason Griffey @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
Knight News Challenge from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
SESSION 8 from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
Copyright and Creators: 2026 @ #IdeaDrop from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
Digital Content and the Legality of Web Scraping from Idea Drop & ER&L on Vimeo.
Categories
LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code
I am thrilled to be able to announce that The LibraryBox Project has been invited to be one of the projects included in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Google Summer of Code.
If you aren’t familiar with the Google Summer of Code, it is a program that gets undergraduates connected to open source projects via mentor organizations. The goal is to give the students experience working on useful open code, while projects benefit from their skills to set and meet development goals. Google pays the students a stipend, and the whole open source community wins.
The LibraryBox Project has a few different goals in mind for the summer, and is looking for awesome students who want to make a difference in the world. If you’re a student that is interested in working on an international open source project that is being used in more than 40 countries and on all 7 continents, one that makes a difference in education in developing nations and acts as a tool for activism and social change in repressive countries, come join us.
Applications open March 14th, and close March 25th.
If you know anyone that’s applying, send them our way.