The title should say it all: via Warren Ellis (via Paul Di Filippo), I give you SciVee – a video-sharing community site devoted to the dissemination of scientific research.
[tags]science, video, internet, community[/tags]
Tag Archives: internet
The internet is a major feature of reducing carbon emissions
A lot of the plans for sustainability try to provide the energy for what we already do using new sources of power. Whether you subscribe to the peak oil camp or you fear global warming or even if you want to prudent ahead of a possible recession caused by sub-prime mortgages, each problem has the same solution: use less. Buying less consumables, reducing food miles, rebuilding soils and producing electricity from renewables can only do so much.
Transport is a huge part of the energy (and money) we spend. A future coming to terms with the ‘Peak Century’ will need to travel much less distance for work, play and neccessity. The 50 mile commute seems illogical now at close to $100 dollar a barrel of oil. If oil gets harder to extract and prices rise, that commute won’t just be an annoying expense, it’ll mean bankruptcy. Fortunately new technology has arrived, seemingly perfect timed to coincide with reducing our carbon footprint and energy consumption.
A geologist recently said “My hopeful view is that we’ll be living like we did at the turn of the 20th century, but with computers.” I like the analogy. The internet and low-energy computers offer us a real potential of making a low carbon economy yet still providing jobs and a worldwide community. As Worldchanging puts it, the ‘High bandwidth, Low Carbon future’ could be both sustainable and more personally fulfilling. Google is investing $100Million in Green computing and the Asus EEE laptop uses 11 watts. All this talk of choose your own price music, online markets for fiction and e-readers is important because it’s a first step to creating an entertainment economy that could work in the low-energy world that’s coming, sooner or later.
The infancy of e-democracy
I have to confess to a certain bullish optimism about the potential of internet technologies to transform the way democratic governments operate – but I’m not under any illusions that we’re even close to success yet. There are steps being taken in the right direction, however – Michael Cross takes a look at the UK government’s electronic petition site, and concludes that – while it’s largely used in frivolous ways at the moment – the fact that it’s there at all, allowing admittedly odd (and occasionally crack-pot) opinions to appear on government webspace can only be a good sign. [Image by spjwebster]
Sadly, politics being politics, new technology isn’t always going to be used in the nicest of ways – I was rather disappointed to hear [via MetaFilter] that the US Democrats are crowdsourcing their smear campaigns by supplying video footage of Republican candidates for people to remix as they see fit. Fighting fire with fire … as the old anarchist joke goes, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in”.
[tags]internet, politics, democracy[/tags]
Online publishing: how can we do it right?
As you may have noticed, Paul has been putting lots of links to other online fiction markets over the last week or so – we hope to encourage people to read the stories from all over the interweb. The topic of internet vs traditional publishing has been sweeping the sf blogosphere recently and there are some superb opinions on the subject. Some notable contributions include Erin Hoffman at Homeless Moon, the editor of Clarkesworld, Tobias Buckell, Booksquare on the viability of the iphone as a ebook reader, Paolo Bacigalupi’s superb 5-part critique of the state of the current print mags. Heavyweights John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow and Warren Ellis all helped start the debate.
The print medium hasn’t had such a quick transition into the internet world of the twentieth century, giving it the advantage of seeing how badly its brethren in the music and film industry have dealt with change. By stubbornly trying to hold on to old business models and suing many of those uptaking new technology, music and film executives alienated large quantities of their target audience and only recently has there been movement towards a sensible model. As digital paper and ebook readers get closer to producing an enjoyable reading experience, editors and authors will have to adapt to the digital age too.
The print digital revolution has the advantage of hindsight – we’ve seen how badly avoiding the idea is and have some element of time to start thinking about alternatives. Whether by email weekly story subscriptions, ebook purchases, tipjars for individual stories or community collection before posting, the internet is offering alternatives. I’d be interested to know what Futurismic readers feel about the debate. Of course, we can’t move to a new writing paradigm if people aren’t reading – so travel to some of the links on the side and read some of the great SF out there on the internet already!
[via Tobias Buckell, image from the latest cover of Clarkesworld magazine]
Stupidfilter – an end to linguistic internet idiocy?
This has to be a spoof – it’s just too good to be true. Stupidfilter is apparently "open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English", that will prevent the accessing and posting of grammatically flawed or misspelled content on websites. It will be available in server-side and client-side flavours … unless Rupert Murdoch sues it out of existence for instantly rendering MySpace a dead property. [Via OhGizmo!]
[tags]internet, language, grammar, spelling, filter[/tags]