Globetechnology has a story on “The world’s most connected place” by Dave Ebner from Sept. 16, 2004. Canada is the second most connected country in terms of percentage of households with high-speed Internet connections after South Korea. And, massive on-line gaming is one reason Koreans are getting high-speed. (Apparently Korea is also dense and urban, which makes it easier to wire.)
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text-e
text-e was an online symposium that is interesting both as an online event and in terms of content. The site is tri-lingual (French, English and Italian) and brought a number of speakers, like Umberto Eco, around the subject of “impact of the Web on reading, writing and the diffusion of knowledge” in 2001.
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A9 and why you would use it
Company > Why use A9.com?” href=”http://a9.com/-/company/whatsCool.jsp”>A9.com > Company > Why use A9.com? A9, which combines google and Amazon (and other things) into a unified search environment, is now out of beta. You can get an account with a diary, history, and links. Could this be better than plain old google?
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Carnivore
Carnivore is an art network surveillance tool that can be built on. They provide the CarnivorePE application that watches a network and passes the data stream to clients you make for art purposes. Check out the example projects.
Berry: Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement
Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement by Josephine Berry, is an essay on the NetArt Commons: Slash Site about net art projects and the free software movement. It is part of OPEN SOURCE ART HACK, which I think is a NetArt Commons topic (but I am still figuring out the site) and an exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
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boohbah Flash for kids
Boohbah Zone is a neat little Flash site for what I assume is a kids TV show. Sent to me by Judith.
Zen Garden: CSS Design
css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design is a site with one page and many different CSS designs. It is a great demonstration of how design can change content and how form and content can be separated and then manipulated independently. This is thanks to StÈfan Sinclair.
Village Colleges
The design, decoration and equipment of our places of education cannot be regarded as anything less than of first-rate importance – as equally important, indeed, as the teacher. … We shall not bring about any improvement in standards of taste by lectures and preachings; habitation is the golden method. … The school, the technical college, the community centre, which is not a work of architectural art is to that extent an educational failure.
viewing Impington – Henry Morris and the idea of the village college is an extended essay in an encyclopedic site on informal education: infed.org. The essay on Morris and village colleges talks about the attention to balanced space for these community education centres. The Village College combined children’s education with lifelong learning and community spaces.
It would take all the various vital but isolated activities in village life – the School, the Village Hall and Reading Room, the Evening Classes, the Agricultural Education Courses, the Women’s Institute, the British Legion, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the recreation ground, the branch of the County Rural Library, the Athletic and Recreation Clubs – and, bringing them together into relation, create a new institution for the English countryside.
Homer-Dixon: Ingenuity Gap
The Ingenuity Gap is a book by Thomas Homer-Dixon that evolved out a 1995 article, The Ingenuity Gap. It is a moving plea for the attention and intelligence in the face of increasingly complex problems.
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Amin Maalouf: Books I forgot were good
In today’s The Globe and Mail there is a review essay about terror that included a review of In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf. I knew that name was familiar and, browsing his site, realized he had written two great novels I had forgotten, one a historical novel, Leo the African and the science-fiction novel, First Century after Beatrice. I’m embarassed that I didn’t connect those two novels. Time to read more of his work, especially on identity and terror as an antidote to the possible orientalism of Western writers like Bernard Lewis.
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