Accept no substitutes

Day: February 4, 2007

Working group on Expertise, Science, and Democracy Spring Talks

One will be me. I’m not exactly repeating the talk I recently did at Duke; I’m asking folks who come to this upcoming talk to add, subtract, modify the wiki pages of that talk and/or to send me email (jonesATuncDOTedu) and/or post a comment on this blog entry as a way of participating in the talk before it even begins. So have at it! And do come to the talks. All three look good.

Thurs February 8, 3:30 pm @ Hanes Art 118:
“The Intellectual Commons”
Don Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill

Thurs March 8, 3:30 pm @ Hanes Art 118
Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org,
“Participatory Digital Libraries – Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends”

Fri March 30, 3:30 pm @ Saunders 220
Matthew Farish, Department of Geography and Program in Planning,
University of Toronto, “From Recognition to Regulation: Climate Laboratories and the Nature of War”*
*co-sponsored with UNC Geography

Robots and Radios

Just back from Legopalooza at the Morehead Science Center where Joe Meno of BrickJournal had a simple MindStorms robot running around a table. The robot has a sonar/ultrasound/bat-like radar sensor so that when it encountered an object it would reverse course and then turn in a random direction. The fun for kids of all ages was that we had to be the objects or the robot would run off the table. [It’s this one but without the camera part. So the NXT spy rover without the spying part.]
Yesterday Tucker helped build and put a second robot on the table. And today we returned with reinforcements, two other 13 year old boys, to create a third robot. One robot running around the table was amusing. Two on the table at once were hilarious. And three. That’s the right number for chaotic delight.

We left and then took the boys to WCOM where they began the Teen Spirit radio show with an in-studio interview with Django Haskins and Josh Starmer of the Old Ceremony. Django sang and played guitar while Josh played cello which led to some interesting sound engineering. The Old Ceremony is off for a couple of gigs opening for the Squirrel Nut Zippers and a trip to NYC.

Later in the show, the teens did a phone interview with electronic composer/musician Olspur who they discovered on LastFM.com.

Talk about different music and different interviews. Both went well and all seemed to have a great time. No known robots took part in the interviews.

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