Dogbot (pre-setup) Video Stream from James Young
Video of Kimric Smythe's Hurt Locker Eggs and Gever Tulley's Book 2.0 Talk from James Young
Video of Ken Goldberg's Opinion Space from James Young
time:
7:30pm Wednesday
28 April 2010
place:
Chez D Pi
1034 39th St
Emeryville, CA
FREE ADMISSION but donations appreciated.
Cash Bar 21+
Food Carts! Pizza Hacker and Good Foods and MORE (stay tuned)
Chez D Pi
Ken Goldberg - Visualizing Opinions
"Opinion is the medium between ignorance and knowledge." -- PlatoOpinion is notoriously ill defined and subject to all kinds of biases and uncertainty principles (this won't come as a surprise to anyone at Dorkbot). Opinion is hard to measure. Can it be visualized?
On March 15 2010, the U.S. State Department launched Opinion Space, a visualization tool for world opinion developed by students and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. It's an experimental interactive website where participants can instantly see where they stand with respect to others. It uses dimensionality reduction techniques to display the emerging diversity of viewpoints and collaborative scoring metrics to help the community highlight comments that are most insightful. The resulting map is not based on geography or predetermined categories, but on similarity of opinion. The development team from Berkeley will join in an open discussion of the concepts behind the experiment, our experiences working with the government, the results so far, and opinions in general. You can give it a try at: http://state.gov/opinionspace
Ken Goldberg is a professor at UC Berkeley. He holds the craiglist Distinguished Chair in New Media, and is Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, with secondary appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the School of Information. He is Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Ken is also an artist. Ken's art installations have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial, Pompidou Center in Paris, Buenos Aires Biennial, and the ICC in Tokyo. Ken is an IEEE Fellow, Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series.
Kimric Smythe - Hurt Locker Easter Eggs
Kimric will be showing off easter eggs that have a Very Small explosive device (think firecracker) wired to a variety of ,tilt switches,timers, and dummy wires that you had to disarm to win the prize. He called them "Hurt Locker" eggs, after the movie by the same name.Kimric Smythe was half of the team that did the pyro for Burning Man for 10 yrs. He did some experiments for a web site that wanted some crazy stuff including propane fueled vacuum cleaners, rocket powered inflate a dates and exploding doll houses. Other stunts Kimric has been involved in are the Car Hunt, The Amorphous Blob, The Orca Bomb, Return of the Fat Man , Weird TV, and The Drive-By Shooting Range and many more. He along with Shannon O'Hare have put steampunk on the map building a 3-story Victorian mobile house driven by a steam engine and other experiments with steam since STEAM IS THE NEW FIRE.
Some other more practical projects are; the machine mounted camera for SRL shows that produced really nice footage, a livelihood repairing and selling accordions at Smythe's Accordion Center and his improbable taste in cars.
http://www.smythesaccordioncenter.com/
Gever Tulley - Book 2.0 - how we did everything wrong and wrote a book
Technology is changing the notion of what a book is, and eliminating the need for publishers and agents. Want to write a book and get it on the market? Chances are publishers won't like your book, but here's the good news - making a book these days is more and more like a launching a tech startup from your garage.Gever Tulley is author of "Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do)" and the founder of Tinkering School. He was once a hardware and software developer whose professional career started at age 16 and includes stints at companies including Xaos Tools, Quokka Sports, and Adobe. He describes Tinkering School as the best mistake he ever made.
http://www.fiftydangerousthings.com/
http://www.tinkeringschool.com/
Please mail Karen Marcelo (dorkbotSF [at] dorkbot [dot] org) or Anselm Hook (anselm [at] hook [dot] org) if you would like to open dork (10-15 min mini-presentation)