Arcosanti as Holiday Village

Heard a fascinating piece on NPR this morning: an Indiana developer, Leroy Troyer, wants to put a vacation destination under glass in Indiana. This has taken off in Europe. Families drive to these venues, park the car, stay for a few days and walk everywhere.

http://www.centerparcs.com/ describes "Holiday Villages" across Europe and the UK. They speak to "Short Breaks and Family Holidays". Maybe a bit Disney, but I find these places appealing, along the lines of a Dude Ranch.  These types of projects could be an interesting addition to an agro-tourism regional development model. Sort of a chunky nougat for an industry cluster. Sorry.

The Indiana project is with NPR's Morning Edition at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124593116 and the comments range from support to cynicism.

For some other projects, take a browse through http://www.buckminster.info/ for Fuller's Old Man River City (an intimate dome for 125,000 people) and http://www.arcosanti.org/ for another big vision of an urban living system from Paolo Soleri's work.

SIU Innovative Systems Conference SIUIS4 First Light

A very quick look at some photographs from the Southern Illinois University Innovative Systems conference, SIUIS4.

Flyover Country No More!!!

Tight security involved gas powered weaponry capable good for three to five rounds of T-shirt bombardment in this backpack-mounted platform. I'm sure 2.0 will be good for ectoplasm.

I'm all for elegant code, but there's something about cannon that just says one *really* cares about the project.

See also http://www.punkinchunkin.com/ for more insights into the Sport of Geeks. Now *that* is art.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Anil Mehta, sweating the small stuff to make a good conference even better.

The weather's been outstandingly North Sea here in the Carbondale Illinois area, but I say that will make the Seattle area visitors feel right at home.

There was a nice level of enthusiastic chaos amongst the student volunteers pulling together services for the conference, and a pretty comfortable, smiling group of people moving through the event.

Like a said in another post: World View, Intimate Venue. Nice, bright folks pumped about what they're doing and the potential of it all.

Cheeze Pizza Cheese Pizza Cheese Pizza

The "Green Room" loaded with Pizza, coffee, and volunteers. (And hungry people like me sneaking pizza.)

Logistics were a little shaky, but this is the kind of conference where a few more bucks would really make it sing. Parking permit in advance would have been nice, 'frinstance.

I want to see another conference here in six months, oh please.

Low cost, low hype, high content, real people. Sahweet mercy what a refreshing spin on tech. All here in Southern Illinois.

Robots? Got 'em. UAVs? Sure.

These guys had just torn down a 4H robotics demo from the night before and bless their cotton sox were back putting it together for this conference. The group's also working on some interesting UAV concepts and I hope DARPA, et.al, pick up on the potential.

All for now. Two more good days of the SIUIS4.

-30-

World View, Intimate Venue: SIU Innovative Systems Conference October 29-31

Thursday, October 29 through Saturday October 31, the SIU Innovative Systems Conference will afford a world view in an intimate venue.

If you are a coolhunter, this little event will, I am confident, amaze you.

Go To The Conference

If the conference were in New York, Mumbai, Melbourne, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Toronto, Beijing, Moscow, etc., you would want to go. Don't assume because it's here that it will not be amazing.

It's in Carbondale, Illinois and I am glad that I will not have to fly to it.

Innovation isn't a new-fangled thing here. We had R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Fuller right here, and there's even one of his surviving domes in town just a short hop from the conference. (The local non-profit taking care of restoring the dome could use some bucks so cough some, please at http://www.buckysdome.org/)

Thought Leadership from Leading and Emergent Technology Companies

Speakers represent, generally, technology leaders from senior positions in companies with a heavier emphasis upon network systems and electronics. Topics include exploration of new algorithms for network design in wireless communications, panel sessions on the economy, dynamics of networked information, a MATLAB tutorial, and topics which I would characterize as growing Social Entrepreneurship.

Companies: Cisco, LSI, Mathworks, Motorola, The Danda Group, Teradata, Calit2, Colorado Timberline, Avaya Labs, New Blankets Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Synopsis, Columbia University, Joule Labs, Equitech International LLC, The Element, Medergy, Bell Laboratories, Z.S. Associates and others.

This small conference has assembled truly impressive slate of presenters from the thought leadership of global technology:

Amar Nath Ray
Amit Sethi
Bonnie Horner
Brian Savin
Dewayne Hendricks
Dinesh Hiripityage
Flavio Bonomi
George Vanecek
Giampiero Campa
James Debelina
John Waclawsky
Joseph Deken
Nathan Nobbe
P. Krishnan
Paul Fleming
Qi Wang
Rich Goldman
Terry Galloway
Vijay Gurbani
Viswanath Annampedu

Das Blinkenlights! This kit rocks.

Based upon what I saw at the recent SIU Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009), the serendipitous, intelligent, and enthusiastic demonstrations of student project demos will be the hidden gem of the conference.

Wind and water power, new interactive and immersive display technology, prototypes and "almost ready for prime time exhibits" are well worth the time. Many of these innovations need comparatively little funding (say, from a few thousand up to $500,000 to get product out the door, if even that much.) I've been calling it the milli-loan emergent market to contrast with the wee and wonderful micro-loans.

Rapt Musing: Human Beings At Conference! Hooray!

This is real. This is not synthesized by a soulless corporate puke (and I have been a corporate puke, albeit soulful). Yes! The guys with the pocket protectors who if I did not see during a due diligence meeting or a "strategic partnership discussion" with a somethingdotcom I'd move along fast to the next conversation. At the TIE 2009 last month, someone was having a problem with a demo (it was only batteries) but that is a wonderful experience. Real stuff. Maybe some blue sparks and flames. Something that does not represent distillation into a mega media sound byte.

Friends.

Some of the SIU student work evokes the efforts of organizations like Stanford University's Social Innovation Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability and very much reflects a growing maker culture (DIY, but I extend maker philosophy to manufacture of artifacts of all sorts, including code, hence techne in the name of this blog.)

In short: local (to me), smart, inspiring, and making me get "all hope up" which my great grandma Keneipp always warned against over in Saline County here.

The conference, now in its fourth year, owes its beginnings to the efforts of Anil Mehta, here also pictured in an article on the First SIU Intelligent Systems Exposition in 2007.

conference schedule is provided here at the main website.

PS: Fall Colors all over the place down here.

More Information Below

Website: http://innovativesystems.siu.edu/

Location:

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Get People to Food to People

Transportation systems for schools have high utilization at peak times and no utilization at others.

The Gothamist reports "Real Seniors Take School Buses To Buy Fresh Food"

This has been a recurring issue for me for a couple of years now: how to use things like transportation systems more intelligently.

Other things to fix:

• Integrate scheduling for county-based transportation systems in Southern Illinois (now only 5 days a week, inter-county complexity in routes/fares/extra fees/etc.
• Examine more efficient utilization of transport (for example, to pick up or deliver food) and manage health and safety issues through "intelligent boxes"which have telltales regarding handling of foods. These could even have features to allow only a certified operator to open the box (e.g., with a little bluetooth app for the food person at either end).
• Design for multi-use (buses with removable seats, etc.)

Ok. Time to weatherstrip the front door.... chilly day here.

Oh yeah. Most of the code for this exists in open source, I'd wager. Google Apps work too.

Reporting on SIU Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009)

Back on the network, just in time to cover Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009) at Southern Illinois University on Friday 9 October 2009.

The event will showcase SIU research projects.

I'm sorry that it's on a Friday before a three day weekend, but looks like a solid crowd.

And who could resist "'Electronic Nose' Research at SIU"?

They opened for Jefferson Airplane, I think....

Thank You Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich, founder of Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC)and author of many essays of ethical pondering and proscriptive advice in education (Deschooling Society, for example) anticipated the deconstruction and ubiquity of informational systems as resource webs.

"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available."

"Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.

2. Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as modelsfor others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients."

"I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web."

"What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching."

Illych began the work which comprised "Deschooling Society" in 1967, and finalized the published work after discussions in Cuernavaca at Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in November, 1970.

Now that's futurism. After 37 years, reality starts lining up with the vision.

I've relied upon Illych's "big ideas" in crafting my own educational path after attending CIDOC in 1974. Later, I returned to Illych's thoughts in developing technology adoption "models" for telecommunications clients and financial companies who needed to deal with what was apparent chaos but in fact celebration of the access and flow of information.

Thank you, Ivan Illych.