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POPS Brain overload: can no longer think wisely "Every day, just to keep up to date, that grey lump between your ears has to shovel ever bigger piles of infotainment — tottering jumbles of global-warming updates, web gossip, refugee crises, e-mails, fashion alerts, Twitters and advertisements. Now research suggests that we may have reached an historic point in human evolution, where the digital world we have created has begun to outpace our neurons’ processing abilities"
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POPSFree Foreign Language Lessons A great way to learn 37 languages for free. Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Russian and much more. You can listen to all audio lessons on your computer and mp3 player.
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POPSThe New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online A worthwhile article , KK explores the newly arising power of social networks, adhocracy and the newly emergent cyberculture. Though I do not resonate with his use of the term 'socialism', a deep forray into the web event of collaboration provides a different view of the potential for a change we all hope for. Open source is definitely the way to go.
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POPSCampus Party 2009 Campus Party 2009 in Valencia has just started but it's there for a week at the city of arts and sciences. Can you imagine downloading the whole of Wikipedia in 30 seconds!
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POPSThe underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs
But it’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched,
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POPSThe "Generation M" Manifesto More: There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M." What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s… I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours. It's Gen M's job to foot the bill for your profligacy — and create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.
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POPSKODACHROME: First Great Color Film Remembered in Photos The demise of Kodachrome came just three days before a National Geographic exhibition, "Kodachrome Culture: The American Tourist in Europe", opened in the society's Washington, D.C., headquarters. The exhibit, which will run until September 7, 2009, shows Americans' burgeoning fascination with vivid color photographs of Europe.
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POPSThe New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online From the article: "We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections." Interesting thought.
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POPSNot-So-Great Expectations “Why,” he said, “would you want to do anything more than you already do?” "What a question! What a mind-bend! What a culture-clashing, anachronistic, out-of-this-world concept this had seemed: Know your limits. Acknowledge them. Deal with them. It had struck me as a revelation. The timor mortis explanation is really the only way to account for all the lowbrow concerns that have increasingly crowded out my higher thoughts as I advance in my forties. The weeds choking the garden. The hundreds of digital photos that no one has ever seen. The kid-art that hasn’t been hung. All these undone things, all these instances in which I Fail to Meet Expectations (according to the imaginary report card I update every day), derive their urgency for me from the sense that, if did meet performance standards, then I would be living my life to the fullest."
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POPS‘Brothers in Arms’: A Song That Wrote Itself The final master, now the end title, is the piano/vocal I cut in my living room that evening, accompanied by a string arrangement we added after the fact. I hope you to get see the movie. I’m glad I did. Looking for Brothers In Arms - Single by John Ondrasik? Download iTunes and discover what makes it the world's most popular digital media player. Turn your CD collection into a digital music collection. Buy songs for 99¢ each. Download movies, TV shows, and more. http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/download/?artistName=John%20Ondrasik&thumbnailUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fa1.phobos.apple.com%2Fus%2Fr1000%2F054%2FMusic%2F5b%2F6f%2F32%2Fmzi.aklrhity.100x100-75.jpg&itmsUrl=itms%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2FWebObjects%2FMZStore.woa%2Fwa%2FviewAlbum%3Fid%3D307492805%26partnerId%3D30%26siteID%3DCTiugamq7cM-pVF.9bfLcR2JmqwPI5e38w%26ign-mscache%3D1&albumName=Brothers%20In%20Arms%20-%20Single
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POPSNeuroculture There is currently amazing exhibition at FACT, Liverpool, UK. It is based on sound and sisorientation through disruption of senses, but one room is wired via an artificial neuron to many locations in the UK, from football stadia to schools, where sounds are picked up and fed through software set to mimic thalamic thresholds and into the room at FAXT where you walk between a matrix of suspended speakers and through an everchanging soundscape of analogue real time sounds filtered by digital simiulation of fire/not fire neuron. Conceptually fascinating, experientially wonderful.
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POPSCulture Machine: Generating Research in Culture & Theory The aim of Culture Machine is to seek out and promote the most provocative of new work, and analyses of that work, in culture and theory from a diverse range of international authors. Culture Machine is particularly concerned to promote research which is engaged in the constitution of new areas of inquiry and the opening of new frontiers of cultural and theoretical activity. It is also committed to the generation of possibilities for new scholarship and research.
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POPSBrave New World of Digital Intimacy 
It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.
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POPSFacebook Never Forgets "The Internet's anonymity, long memory and free-for-all gossip culture may yet prove a poisonous cocktail. But as our generation grows older and enters public life -- thankfully, we have some time -- we'll find ourselves in a political culture that increasingly views these "gotcha" moments in context and with an eye toward forgiveness. After all, the incriminating photo, the offensive blog post, that drunken 3 a.m. e-mail -- it could have been any of us."
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POPSMicrosoft says screw the Long Tail Way to go Microsoft. The whole point of the digital distribution era is it affords content makers the opportunity to sell their content without worrying about mass appeal (Long Tail economics). Microsoft is now eviscerating its digital distribution platform, Xbox Live Arcade, in favor of digitally stocking "good" games (and thereby deleting unpopular ones from its catalog). While the idea isn't unsound if Microsoft wants to build a robust library, it certainly goes against the entire grain of the digital age.
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POPSone of our own has just won! kudos! Digital art defines the contemporary. The Los Angeles Center For Digital Art is dedicated to the propagation of all forms of digital art, new media, digital video art, net art, digital sculpture, interactive multimedia, and the vast panorama of hybrid forms of art and technology that constitute our moment in culture. We are committed to supporting local, international, emerging and established artists through exposure in our gallery. We have an ongoing schedule of exhibits and competitions, produce editions of wide format archival prints, and collaborate in the production of digital artworks in our studio. As well we are involved with curating digital exhibits at institutions and festivals outside of the LACDA gallery schedule.
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