PRI's The World: Technology Podcast 204
August 01, 2008
A lot to chew and stew on for this week's Technology Podcast (#204, available here), courtesy of PRI's The World. So, as I like to say most weeks, let's jump right in.
We lead off with this week's Internet back and forth in Beijing. The International Olympic Committee had promised foreign journalists that they would have unfettered access to the Internet. But by Wednesday, the IOC had to backpedal a bit. Turns out sites related to Tibet and Falun Gong, for example, were going to be off limits to reporters. Ah, but today, the Beijing Organizing Committee changed its mind again, and unblocked those sites. Ah, we always knew the Games were going to raise some interesting issues surrounding human rights...
Next up, a radio piece I did regarding the Gary McKinnon case, which I blogged about yesterday. Really, an incredible little tale.
Then, we hear about emotibots. This is an interview with David McGoran, creator of Heart Robot. The little cuddly 'bot even makes an appearance in the interview!
Freelance Tech Reporter Cyrus Farivar has been following the growing market for cheap sub-notebook computers, or netbooks as some call them, for a while now. We're talking about efforts like MIT's One Laptop Per Child Project. Intel has a rival machine called the Classmate, and this week Portugal said it was going to order 500,000 of them to give out to youngsters. Cyrus fills us in on the details, and also talks about India's plan to build a homegrown $10 computer. That's right -- $10. Yes, government subsidies would be involved...
And now, a quiz. What is this at left? Well, it's called the Antikythera Mechanism, and it dates back to ancient Greece. For decades now, mathematicians, archaeologists, and researchers of just about every stripe have been trying to figure out exactly what its function was. This week, some of these researchers think they figured out another part of the puzzle. It may very well have been used as a kind of celestial clock to mark the intervals between Olympic Games. For the podcast, we feature an interview with Dr. Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, who even brought a model of the device into the studio.
And we end this week's podcast with a fun little story about British author George Orwell. Orwell tackled just about every literary form during his life: novels, polemics, essays, poems, even a one-act play. One thing he did not get to do...is blog. But now, The Orwell Prize, which gives out awards each year for the best political writing in Britain, is out to change all that. Starting next week, the organization will start to publish Orwell's personal diaries as blog entries, 70 years to the day after they were written.
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The interviewer in the bit about emotibots was wrong when he claimed that all films showed robots as terrible beings (although most films do).
For positive images of robots (especially robots who could think) then there's "Bicentennial Man". Even "I, Robot" was more nuanced than "thinking robots are out to get us".
BTW, I enjoy the podcasts.
Posted by: Francisco | August 03, 2008 at 04:11 AM