Artist collaborative plan b makes location-specific works and performances exploring the dynamics of narrative and time. It is composed of artist partners Daniel Rogers and Sophia New; Daniel has been carrying GPS trackers with him everywhere since 2003, and Sophia since 2007. They visualize GPS data by translating time-stamped coordinates into lines, and. . .   Read More

Alexa.com allows users to compare traffic to different websites through time according to reach, rank, and page views and using various levels of magnification. It’s fascinating to compare not only the quantity of traffic, but the shape of growth curves. For example, although Facebook is still slightly behind MySpace in terms reach (though it appears […]

Futarchy is an untried form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which officials define measures of national welfare while prediction markets determine which policies are most desirable. In Hanson’s words, “we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs.”

Futarchy is based on the assumption that poor nations are poor because their. . .   Read More

Linden Lab releases new builds every week. Flickr releases them up to every half hour. Writer and publisher Tim O’Reilly writes that “the open source dictum, ‘release early and release often’ in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in which the product is developed in the open, with new […]

Add England’s Rothamsted Experimental Station to the list of long-term experiments.
“Rothamsted’s Classical experiments are unique in their age and variety, and are, deservedly, world-famous. There are many other experiments on our Rothamsted and Woburn farms that, by conventional standards, can justifiably be described as ‘long-term’. Most of these were. . .   Read More

For the past few years Chris Hibbert has been working on Zócalo, an Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets. He writes, “my purpose in the project is to build prediction market software that people can use as a foundation for deploying many markets of this type. As I said in my proposal to CommerceNet, the […]

Arborsculpture, a term coined by Richard Reames, “is the art of shaping trees trunks. It is often accomplished by framing, bending, grafting and pruning. [sic] Using one or many trees guided into pre designed shapes, functional or artistic, to remain living or to be harvested” (Reames).

Arborsculptors engage in a very slow ‘sculpting’ of trees. . .   Read More