young women on facebook

Taking time out from getting to grips with philosophies I read this on mashable.com It's a study of about 1605 young women, presumably in the USA, and their facebook habits. I was impressed that some young women manage to check facebook first thing in the morning before they have even gone to the bathroom.

None of the other highlights on mashable seemed particularly surprising. The article writers seemed disturbed that:

• "42% think it’s okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated
• 79% are fine with kissing in photos"

which all seems so normal now, and hardly worrying, as I have watched my nieces' exploits online for a while. I am glad that my own daughters did not have the ability to publish pictures of their teenage exploits, leading me to stay unaware of exactly what they were up to.

The Experimental Society

I am sitting on my bed in a student room on Lancaster University's disorienting campus, where I am attending the last event of Experimentality at the Institute for Advanced Studies, trying to assimilate just a little of what I have been hearing for the last two days. I should be sitting in the plenary session on Science, Art & Religion but I wasn't sure that I would be able to take it in. It's an interesting conference, but is making me feel as though there must be a lot of books out there that I haven't read or maybe have read but haven't remembered.

Day One started with a brain-frying opening address from Scott Lash, called "To infinity and beyond: experiment/experience". His talk included references to Kant, Derrida, Stiegler, Aristotle, Francis Bacon (not the artist), Philip K. Dick, Michel Callon and Thomas Heatherwick, with Latour and Foucault popping up in the questions. I am sure there was a Mathematician in there too but can't find it in my notes.

Scott was bouncing around and explaining so many things that it's going to take me a while to work it out, but here's a rough version from my frantically scribbled notes. I'll take you through step by step but can't guarantee it will make any sense, as I only got about 10% of it. I'm sure it's just a question of concentrating, and perhaps doing a degree in modern philosophies.

Kant's Critique of Reason (apparently the second edition is the one to read) was first up. I recently read an essay of his, thanks to Patrick explaining something to me about Enlightenment as "man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity" so thought, phew, am recognising some names here. Derrida and Stiegler were mentioned, as was technological phenomenology, so I made a note that I really need to read some of that, as I have in the past and found it interesting.

OK:

• Francis Bacon: the first empiricist; he wrote about experiments; defined his experimentation against the church dogma of the time.
• He wrote about moving from the situation of experience to the situation of experiment; from subjectivity and experience to subjectivity and experiment
• Bacon wanted to put experiment in the place of logic; logic is a tool that disagrees with metaphysics
• (I ♥ wikipedia)
• Bacon said there are two types of experience - accident & experience
• a posteriori knowledge is what we get from experiment/experience
• we need to keep a posteriori knowledge in our notions of experiment

I think that means that we experiment with open minds and only take from the experiment that which we learn from it.

• Kant puts experience at the centre of knowledge; there is no knowledge without experience
• we perceive the world, intuit the world, through transcendental aesthetic - space & time
• Nowadays we do have knowledge with direct experience

(I did want to ask if they had books in Kant's day because surely that is not direct experience but thought I was probably missing the point somewhere)

• Badiou (aha! here's the mathematician) says that knowledge has nothing to do with experience

Now I am confused - will have to check that out, but it is something to do with that in modern geometry the figure disappears, contemporary mathematics we have knowledge without direct experience, proving we have secular infinities, some infinities are bigger than others.
At this point I was wondering if Scott had disproved the existence of God, which would be handy.

• Back to the theme.
• What is an experiment?

I'm going to go read the rest of the notes now and come back to this when my brain is slightly less fried

robots and avatars

I was invited to a lunchtime discussion in London at NESTA: Robots and Avatars – our colleagues and playmates of the future organised and chaired by Ghislaine Boddington of body>data>space
The conversation was kicked off by provocateur Noel Sharkey who is Professor of AI, Robotics and Public Engagement. Lovely combination! It was an interesting and wide ranging conversation with input from people from different disciplines, including Hazel Grian who has been developing her own robot project as part of an artist's residency at the Pervasive Media Studio,
The lunchtime talk was documented and will be disseminated online as part of Robots and Avatars ongoing research. It's a great site to look at for finding out more about what's going on in the world of robots and avatars, and how these developments might affect the future of work and education.

playing with QR codes again

To find out what this is about, go and download a QR code reader to your cameraphone. The QR code reader is a piece of software that you open up on your phone and it will use the camera to take a picture of this funny square and then display what information is embedded in the pixels.

I use a reader from i-nigma.com
They have a long list of supported devices, i.e. gadgets you can use to run the QR code reader. I found it better to search for the right software on my laptop and then download it to my phone.
I have found that I tend to stop and scan QR codes now just to see what's there.

smugness and 'free' software

So, today I had to try and transcribe a sound file that was recorded on my mobile phone. Needless to say it was in a format the windows media player could not understand, so I downloaded Audacity to listen to it. I have been meaning to do this for a while because Audacity is a really useful piece of free (or make a donation) software that I like to show to groups that I work with so they don't think they have to fork out huge amounts of their budget for microsoft/apple software. I also like to show people another suite of 'free' software; Open Office, which I use instead of Microsoft Office. Open Office will open and save to most other common formats, whether it's text, spreadsheet or presentation (eg .doc, .xls, .ppt) and I use it all the time for work. you can export to .pdf from it too.

Back to sound editing: I did have to download the beta (ie not entirely predictable) version of Audacity so that it would run on windows 7 on my netbook, and with the beta version I could also download a plug in to get Audacity to recognise .amr files (the format to which my phone records sounds). This plug in will recognise various file formats that I have had trouble opening in the past, so fingers crossed, next time I have a range of sound files to work with it will be easier.

And it works, it seems. So now I am feeling pretty smug. And I had better go finish the transcription.

fashion and technology

The fashion world seems to be embracing technology more and more - loved this fashionpopcorn blog post about an Oasis launch that used quite a simple device to engage people, with specially commissioned poetry running on MP3 players for the audience. Artistically presented. I like that they also produced paper-based versions for people to take away as souvenirs.

Will be keeping an eye on this.

launch of the DCRC

Had a great time yesterday at the official launch of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. I met some interesting people and reconnected with old friends and collaborators who had come down to see what we are planning to do. It's an exciting time for all of us at the DCRC, and I am really pleased to be part of a great team of people. I even joined in with my colleagues, to draw with Tine Bech's lights, but refused the lure of the karaoke salon. I have seen the photos...............