The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful?
"World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and 'searchabiliity' to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth. This same paradigm will find you "wrangling" with product-lifecycle- management systems that do for physical objects what the iPod has done for music. These and other radical ideas are delivered in Sterling's latest book`Shaping Things'. This concise book was written to inspire designers to visualize radical scenarios connecting information technology and sustainability in a new ecology of artifacts. Sterling suggests new connections between the virtual world and the physical world that will have you rethinking many of your assumptions about how we relate to products. He will be joined by Scott Klinker, 3-D Designer-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI who leads a graduate design program known for giving form to experimental cultural ideas. Klinker's own design work focuses on digital customization as industry shifts from mass production toward niche production in a networked society. The presentation will include an invitation for Sterlling and Klinker/ Cranbrook to team-up with Google to create a short documentary film that would portray a speculative future of life with SPIMES. Distributed online, this short film would convey the look and feel of SPIME scenarios as a provocation for widespread industry discussion about the new potentials of ubiquitous, ambient, searchable, geolocative products."
(Google Tech Talks, 30 April 2007)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Kantian Euclidean Space and Husserlian Material Ontologies
"When considering the relevance of Kant's transcendental position on Euclidean space, one widespread complaint goes something like this: In what concerns the transcendental validity of mathematics in experience, Kant failed to distinguish between pure and applied geometry the way we do today. Pure geometry, as Hilbert showed, is a mere mathematical multiplicity, an axiomatic system interwoven by means of formal relationships where a priori intuition plays no role at all. Its claims have no empirical content whatsoever. Applied geometry, on the other hand, as exemplified by the use of non-Euclidean geometries by Einstein, has to do with the application of a formal geometrical structure as a means of depicting the empirical world. This application is done under certain theoretical assumptions and the postulation of an empirical spatial congruence. Once the coordination of the geometrical structure with the empirical phenomena is established, it can be empirically tested. There is no place for the idea that Euclidean geometry is a priori and synthetic, a transcendental constitutive of experience. Euclidean geometry is just a possible 'mathematical multiplicity', a formal structure whose correspondence with the physical world is not imposed. Thus, the transcendental a priori validity of geometry for all possible experience as implicitly ascertained in the mathematical principles of the pure understanding appears to have been refuted."
(José Ruiz Fernández, 2003)
Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. Ed. CHEUNG, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne, & Hans Rainer Sepp. Web- Published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
