TheMachine

"Human brains will someday extend into the cloud, futurist and computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil predicted at the DEMO conference here on Tuesday. Moreover, he said, it will become possible to selectively erase pieces of our memories, while retaining some portions of them, to be able to learn new things no matter how old the person is." Of course, it's all about AI and augmented reality, leading right up to our having an augmented brain. Which, in a sense, we have for so long already - at least since we invented writing. But okay, in many ways we're re-inventing writing.  You'll find the video at Computerworld. 

"Apple's stock dropped 2.21 percent on Monday. A few analysts blamed the drop - worth more than $12 billion - on a strike of 4,000 Chinese workers at Apple's manufacturer. But how do we know that strike really happened? Bloomberg's Adam Minter makes the case that the entire narrative is based on messages posted to China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from a single anonymous user." The journalists as DJs - but they have to know and respect their sources.

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

"WeMo lives on your iPhone and uses your home Wi-Fi and mobile internet. Setting up and using it is a snap."

RT @davewiner: Why every news organization should have a river. http://t.co/iBUNFkQvPe

"The tech giant's 'wearable computing' project is now being tested by volunteers, meaning you might already have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded on to Google's servers. How worried should you be?"

"two-thirds of our population is being left behind"