Thursday last week at Technical University of Denmark, was the Audio Information Seminar 2006 held. AIS was arranged by the Intelligent Sound Project - a research project funded by the Danish government. The topic was how to extract information from sound. Among the speakers were people from Sony CSL Paris, Music Technology Group in Barcelona and Pandora, and the event was a succesful mix of academia and industry. You can read more about the seminar here

Two nature lovers named Jesse and Nate, have spend a day or more in the woods to make some kind of machines from wood, stones and twine. The machinery is inspired by the american cartoonist Rube Goldberg who became famous for "exceedingly complex devices that perform simple tasks in very indirect and convoluted ways" (Wikipedia). Take a look at the movie here.

Z Productions - a company founded by electronic artist Paul Granjon in 1988 - is hosting an exibition in which two robots with sexual behavior is exibited. A text on the website explains: "They are programmed to explore their environment, occasionally entering a in heat mode, where they will try and locate a partner in the same state. If a partner is located, the robots will attempt to mate." The robots are programmed in BASIC - see the movie for more details.

As reported by a reader of "The Inquirer", a Dell laptop computer exploded Wednesday at a conference in Japan. Sitting just a few feet away from the incident and reacting fast, the reader was able to take these two pictures:

It is not yet known which Dell model it was ... but it would surely be nice to know!

Ok its very old news, but it deserves to be repeated to those who have heard about it before and announced to those who have not. It is the website dictionaraoke.org which is taking MIDI files of ordinary pop songs, and make a kareoke version on top of it. The voices to the kareoke are sampled from many different dictionaries on the internet and read aloud. Some of the examples are great, e.g. "Barbie girl" by Aqua or the duet "Don't go breaking my heart".

In a press announcement from 2001, dictionarakaoke.org explains: "The project was conceived of by a diverse group of experimental musicians communicating through the Internet. Inspired by the recent addition of spoken word audio clips to the Merriam-Webster and Microsoft Encarta online dictionaries demonstrating the correct pronunciation of each word, these artists have used the samples to create artificial vocals that "sing" karaoke."

In the television series "The Life Of Birds" with David Attenborough, the Superb Lyrebird is giving amazing imitations of machine sounds like camera shutters and chainsaws. The male Lyrabird has learned to mimic sounds of the forrest to impress the females, and as human machines are becoming a part of everyday life, then so are the sounds. Watch the video, which is now famous and in newspapers such as The Daily Mail. (Thanks to Sune for this one.)

The company Blizzard behind World of Warcraft has on Friday June 9 banned more than 30000 of their users from playing. The reason is that these players allegedly have cheated by selling items, gold and characters to other players - something Blizzard does not allow according to their usage terms. At the same time, Blizzard has removed 30 mio goldpieces from different realms, an initiative which is ment to strengthen and rebalance the WoW valuta.

According to BetaNews, the company spokesman is quoted: "We will continue to aggressively monitor all World of Warcraft realms in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating,"

Appearantly, Blizzard has by no means embrassed the link between ingame and outside markets. This is understandable from a safety point of view: Blizzard has a well functioning money generator with 6.5 mio users, so why risk anything? On the other hand, as EverQuest had to face reality so will the decision makers behind WoW at some point, so why not sooner than later. A well regulated market witrh trading points is far more interesting and good business for some sweatshops in far east asia too.

Being homeless in the wealthy parts of the world seems to be different than being homeless elsewhere. At least I dont imagine that a homeless guy in Nigeria has access to a computer and the internet, let alone blogging. But thats actually whats going on in places like California and Tennessee.

In Wired, there is an article with the title "Laptops Give Hope to the Homeless", which describes how some homeless people are trying to use technology to keep them floating or get them back into mainstream society. One example is Hellerich, a woman from Sacramento, who became homeless for a while, but through a women shelter started a blog and came back into not only the high tech stream but into work-life as well. On Hellerich's blog, there are also comments to the Wired interview, which constitutes an interesting circular argument. More famous is Kevin Barbieux from Nashville Tennessee who started bloggin in 2002 and is writing regularly at the blog "The Homeless guy".

Surprised that some homeless can be high tech'ers? Well I admit I was. But what does it mean - or rather - what does it say about these peoples lives or the society we live in, that people with no home still have access to the internet? It is showing that homeless people are extremely different and that being poor in rich countries is different from being poor in poor countries. Not that it is easy in any way - but at least different. Another observation is the omnipresence of technology - blogs are not first and foremost a technological fix og gimic of the internet, it is ordinary way of communicating (in rich societies).