Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media Bell Labs etc - open source zombie gnomes

"We've evolved from being a pack of monkeys to being a pack of monkeys with a dream" Terence McKenna

Nikola Tesla comments in 1926 on wireless "the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain connected by instruments carried in vest pockets."



'Lawn of the Dead' - Zombie garden gnomes chow down on a pink flamingo - being sold on Etsy - great idea wonder why no one has done this this earlier




An interview with Jon Gertner on Bell Laboratories which from the 1920s to the 1980s was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. These ingenious, often eccentric men would were responsible for some of the major innovations of the twentieth century and Jon talks about how they aided in the development of radar, lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.

Australian Heritage Strategy is nearing its closing time for public consultation - given this is the first review in 20 years you have until next Friday to put in a submission.

A Free Mandelbrot Fractal Generator Application for iphone and PC's

The opportunity to make a submission to the UK consultation on open standards has closed. But Glyn Moody's introduction entitled Open Season on Open Standards is still well worth a read - "In the face of the continuing move to such open standards, there has been a rearguard action by traditional proprietary software companies to push FRAND - Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory - as an acceptable default for "open" standards. Except that it is not, as I have discussed at length before ...."



My favourite album this week has been Electric Moon's Inferno. Melkezedek's review pretty much sums it up ".... Chock full of the prime spaced out explorations you expect from the trio, Lunatics Revenge is a perfect bridge to Inferno, where things get even meatier and a shade darker, and deeper..."

A new macrowikinomics video animation featuring some of the world's brightest innovators.

What To Do When Attacked by Pirates - The music industry fought the future and created a black market; book publishers tried another tack - an article on ebook publishing and responses to Piracy by Rob Reid.

A nice guide on how to chemically develop your own photographic film

Another nice pdf guide to Digital Archiving in the 21st century put out by Zotero

Post by Science Insider - Horizon 2020: A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access
by Jop de Vrieze on how the next installment of Europe's gargantuan research funding programs called Horizon 2020 will be on Open Access. Hopes ... the program will have "dedicated support to dissemination (including through open access to research results), communication and dialogue actions" and that "open access shall apply under the terms and conditions laid down in the grant agreement." read more

A nice post on the new features of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6)

Jean Burgess posted her slides for her presentation on the role of social media in crises and risk management during the Queensland floods at the 6th Annual Enterprise Risk Management for Government conference in Sydney.

Weekly Update on Museums, Tech, Social-Media etc - free education makerbot future cities

Our Future is the Future of Our Cities; the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam - Making a City
This Biennale was a call to action which invited architects from around the world to develop models for new urban developments. The main challenge the design of better living conditions for billions of people. But how to make these cities when also responding to urgent social, economic and ecological issues. The video made me feel that Museums need to be a little more active in this discussion if they want to maintain their relevancy in future urban centers.

BandResources.net is a free resource for the gigging band and musician. They are building a database of venues, recording studios, rehearsal studios and labels. None from Australia yet but hopefully that will change soon.

Shapeways CEO on how 3D Printing Will Fuel Creative Commerce

Peter Weijmarshausen believes Shapeways was one of the first companies to put a consumer spin on 3D printing. The startup’s website allows designers to upload their wares for printing and sell the results in an Etsy-like store. Those without design experience can tweak existing models to their liking before printing them in one of 25 different materials, including stainless steel, ceramics and sterling silver. Weijmarshausen says the company printed 750,000 products in 2011. He expects “many times more this year — millions.” The other company most often credited for the rise of the consumer 3D printing trend is



MakerBot, is a really cool new company which sells affordable kit-set 3D printers for about Au 2,200.

What engages students? 10 ideas compiled from interviews with 8th graders by HEATHER WOLPERT-GAWRON

Deconstructing Cinema - One Scene At A Time
By Patrick Samuel

This is a really nice project from Static Mass Emporium which each week takes one scene from a movie and deconstructs it to reveal what kind of an impact they’ve had historically and culturally. It started in September 2011 with A Place In The Sun starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor which looked at the stunning close-ups director George Stevens used for the party scene before moving on to Brian de Palma’s Hitchcockian intro for Snake Eyes, Chan-wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were next. Since then they have looked at key scenes from Remember Me, JFK, The Matrix and All The President’s Men.

The latest is a discussion on American Psycho ... check it out


Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson - False Resume Scandal -
This is just unbelievable no wonder employees find it hard to trust their bosses. Yahoo CEO and ex CTO of PayPal Scott Thompson was forced to apologise after being exposed for lying about false qualifications on his CV. According to Nicholas Carlson of the Business insider he ... wrote an email to staff, expressing his regret for the issue which saw a computer science degree he did not earn appear on his resume. Transcript from 2009 interview on his science degree contains the following ... Gunn: Your bachelor’s degree is in accounting and computer science. Now, from both of those, I mean that’s, that’s pretty obvious that’s Paypal. What are the most important things you learned?

Thompson: Yeah. You know, I think and I, I mention this to young kids when I’m on campus, and my son who I was just talking about at Santa Clara, what I’m happiest about in my background is if you work in technology you’re trained to solve problems.And that’s really it, you’re trained to pull apart very complex things and think about okay, how can I do this or how can I do that or how can I make it better?And that’s really the background that I have and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part thing of being an engineer is you think that way.

and while we're on the subject ...

Megaupload's Kim Dotcom: Inside the Wild Life and Dramatic Fall of the Fat Nerd Who Burned Hollywood
by Daniel Miller, Matthew Belloni

Daniel and Matthew are right this reads like it was made to be a film. "Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, the 300-pound-plus, 6-foot-7 German hacker-turned-web mogul who founded Megaupload, the cyber-locker service that offered its 180 million users remote storage of movies, music and other files. The 13th-most-visited site in the world at one point, Megaupload was a pirates' haven -- a Napster on steroids, where members could share everything from Lady Gaga hits to Transformers movies with anarchists' abandon.

Part of the service's appeal was the antihero persona of Dotcom himself. The 38-year-old had become an online celebrity, as much for his over-the-top lifestyle of $400,000 supercars, supermodel hot-tub parties and the slick YouTube video he had made with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (in it, he raps about Megaupload: "It's a hit! It's a hit!") as for the popularity of his website. And during those two days of meetings with Batal, Dotcom, a self-professed "Dr. Evil" in a loose-fitting black jumpsuit and closely cropped hair, revealed his plan to expand Megaupload, a wildly easy-to-use service, into an empire that would rival that of his idol, Steve Jobs."

This is Big - Free online Accredited Course



MIT offered courses for free when it rolled out its MITx online learning platform last year. However, Harvard took notice of its efforts, and has joined MIT online to form the edX platform and offer courses and content for free on the web. There's no word on the available subjects just yet, but video lessons, quizzes and online labs will all be a part of the curriculum, and those who comprehend the coursework can get a certificate of mastery upon completion. edX won't just benefit those who log on, either, as it'll be used to research how students learn and how technology can be used to improve teaching in both virtual and brick and mortar classrooms. The cost for this altruistic educational venture? 60 million dollars, with each party ponying up half. The first courses will be announced this summer, and classes are slated to start this fall.

Jelly beans used by artist to recreate classic art masterpieces
California-based artist Kristen Cumings was commissioned by candy company Jelly Belly to produce several pieces of jelly bean art to add to its collection ‘Jelly Belly Masterpieces of Confectionary Art’.

Digital items archived from the Occupy movement
This is an interesting archival move - already over 15,000 digital items have been archived from the Occupy movement. They are seeking contributions through a number of different places so if you want to contribute some of your own or are interested in researching there are a number of links from this article

Australian National Cultural Policy delayed
Sydney Morning Herald article by Jacqueline Maley

"The Gillard government's long-awaited national cultural policy has been postponed because of a lack of funds, a casualty of the tight fiscal environment before the budget. The cultural policy, the first such document for nearly 20 years, is still expected to be released this year, but hopes it would be published to coincide with the budget have been dashed, given the government's pledge to return to surplus."

Australian Heritage Strategy - Open for public consultation - closing date 15 June 2012

United States shipwrecks from Battle of the Coral Sea now protected under Australian law
Australian Heritage Minister, Tony Burke, today declared the United States warships the USS Lexington, USS Sims and USS Neosho sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea as protected historic shipwrecks. On 7 May 1942 aircraft from the USS Yorktown and the Lexington sunk the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho just before noon. At about the same time, and in a separate engagement, dive bombers from the Japanese carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku sunk the destroyer USS Sims and left the US fleet oiler Neosho a crippled wreck.

Later that day a support group including the HMAS Hobart and HMAS Australia were attacked by another force of bombers, which were based at Rabaul in New Guinea. The battle continued on 8 May, when the two main carrier forces engaged directly for the first time, resulting in the loss of the Lexington with 216 members of her crew. Victory in the Coral Sea was the first major defeat for Japanese forces and the beginnings of the long and difficult road towards victory.

Plastimake
This looks interesting - it comes in balls but when you add water they become mallable and you can mold them into shapes. The plastic then hardens and becomes usable in any number of ways.

Apple's Internal Marketing Video comparing itself to WW2 1944 propaganda film Jobs as FDR, Mike Murray 'The General'

Courtney Love is having her first art show, and what do you know?

IKEA makes digital cameras out of cardboard

Collections in the clouds – Mythical Beast

Q. What is plastic, metal and glass – coloured black, white and brown – covered in hair – and made out of over 600,000 modular parts?
A. The Powerhouse Museum.

Significance – Pinning the tail on the donkey

Attaching significance to museum objects can be a little like “pinning the tail on the donkey”. Just when you think you’ve got your significance right, off comes the blindfold, and you find your significance statement has failed to account for other curatorial perspectives, or its too long, too short, perhaps its failed to account for other similar objects in the collection or perhaps the language of your story is simply wrong for the times.

These points have been made clear to me over the last three years working on the Total Asset Management (TAM) project which has been cataloguing, conserving and photographing poorly documented collections in the Museum. The collections targeted by TAM tend to be large one such as the Sydney Observatory scientific instruments or the plastics collections and it has been my good fortune to write significance statements for an amazing array of things from anarchist broadsheets to toys and telescopes.

On a practical level this means that whether plastic objects are a 20^th century Kodak cameras or a 19^th century comb we are researching and writing about many different kinds of objects in the same project. This may make the task seem more difficult but there are many surprisingly benefits to be had from working over broader collection areas, especially ones with little or no significance documentation.

Most objects in museum collections acquire their significance when they are brought into the museum and these are almost always written by a curator with a specialisation in a particular collection area. Over time, as staff change, collections are moved around, new databases are set up and new subject heading are applied objects, especially poorly documented ones, start to drift. Labels are lost, collections split up, descriptions changed and perhaps most importantly knowledge passes away into the mists of time, or the rubbish bin in an old unmarked folder.

All this can make the location of objects for day-to-day queries, exhibitions and auditing very difficult. With staff in Registration, Conservation and Curatorial TAM has been able to address some of these issues by working across broader collection areas and re-establishing links between objects and their significance. This was certainly the case for a number of the observatory’s scientific instruments where links between parts, such as spectroscopes or eyepieces, that had been used with an important telescope had never been described in the database records.

Working on the collections I have also been intrigued by how the significance of some objects seems to exist in the realms of the mythic. In fact some of the most enduring notions of significance seem to relate more to what is embedded in people’s minds than the significance statement in a database. A great example of this is the Museum’s graphite elephant which reputedly passed through the fire that destroyed the first Powerhouse Museum collection on the 22 September 1882.

This somewhat apocryphal story claims that as the fire consumed the Garden Palace the elephant plummeted 5 metres into the basement after which iron, wood and glass from the rest of the building fell on top of it. The miraculous nature of this event has lent the elephant an air of significance way beyond that of its being an example of graphite, or carving in Ceylon, and it has been the subject of talks and articles relating to its survival as early as 1939. Age has a way of cementing fiction as fact and over time the elephant has become an integral part of the identity of the museum. It can claim to not only be its earliest object, but at a more metaphorical level it, like the museum, it has risen, phoenix like, to survive disaster.

Unfortunately the truth is almost certainly less inspiring, the management committee reports make it clear nothing but the ‘heaviest iron specimens’ survived the fire and its current object number makes it clear it was purchased as a part of a collection of mineral specimens from Dr. Krantz in Germany, in 1884. Yet the myth has persisted over many years and even if discredited it’s hard to imagine the elephant now returning to take its place next to the other 1500 or so items the museum acquired from Krantz.

This example of the elephant somehow forging its own significance is not so strange however, for in many ways it is simply an amplification the way significance is applied to all museum objects. Objects are just that, objects. They may be seen to be older, rarer, and more expensive than each other but these qualities are not always set in stone. As an older fossil is unearthed, copies of a collectable photograph found, or a common place object becomes rare because others are discarded, it is clear significance is as reliant on the time and place of its interpretation as it is by any innate qualities it possess. Significance may be a good yard-stick by which to measure the worth of an object for a valuation, exhibition, conservation or disaster management, but in doing so we would do well to remember just