Cyborg - a form of art???????

Pardon Me, but the Art Is Mouthing Off from NYTimes

IT was late in the day, rain was streaking the windows of a converted warehouse in San Francisco and the robot was not behaving. Represented by a talking head on a flat-screen monitor, and equipped with voice-recognition software, the artificial intelligence computer - known as DiNA - was designed to chat with visitors about current affairs. She is supposed to be a political animal, or more precisely, machine. But at this point in early November, just a few weeks before making her New York debut, she sounded rather clueless. When asked her opinion of the war in Iraq, she called it a "silly question." When asked whether she supported President Bush, she didn't recognize his name.

The robot's programmer, Colin Klingman, was taken aback. "She has a lot to say on Bush, believe me," he said. "I'll have to check the code."

The robot's creator, on the other hand, seemed unfazed. "She still has a lot to learn," said Lynn Hershman Leeson, the 64-year-old digital-media artist. "And she's not yet connected to the Internet, where she can gather information on anything from the mayor of Pasadena to the capital of Pakistan."

An animated exchange with the programmer followed: could that Internet integration happen in time for DiNA's New York debut at Bitforms gallery? Ms. Hershman Leeson calmly insisted it was important. The programmer relented: "Well, then, that's it. Whatever Lynn says will happen, will happen."

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Forced to Marry Before Puberty, African Girls Pay Lasting Price from NYTimes

quote

Hope is a waking dream.
-- Aristotle

Fire Fox followed by Gmail

The 100 Best Products of 2005 from PCWorld

Child Labors... Do they have a choice?

Child workers refuse to quit jobs from BBC

"And for his pains, Tabrez was paid a pocket money of 50 rupees (just over
$1) a week, and at the end of the month, his employer sent 800 rupees (roughly
$17) to his parents.
Alam has never been to school and can neither read nor
write.
Tabrez Alam wants go back to work. He does not have many plans for the future.
"I will take up any work I can find. There is not much to do back home so I will have to go somewhere else to find work," he says.
Perhaps that explains why forcibly rescuing children from factories does not
work.
Most such children have nothing to go back to. Their parents are unable to provide for them, and many return to work once the dust settles."

good or bad?

Scientists close to producing baby from two dads from The Hindu

"Yet this startling idea is now a serious scientific prospect, say
researchers. Breakthroughs in stem-cell technology could soon lead to
`non-traditional' parents having their own offspring, not always with the help
of a woman's genes, some scientists saying within the next four years. The new
technology currently falls outside existing controls on human fertilisation
science."

[...]

"The technique behind this revolutionary science has been developed
over the past two years. "We still have several years to go before we can use it
on humans," said Professor Harry Moore, of Sheffield University's Centre for
Stem Cell Biology. Following pioneering work on mice carried out by American
researchers, teams — including Moore's — have used embryos donated by patients
undergoing IVF.
"You allow the embryo to develop for a short period in the
laboratory. Then you take out the cells from which it is composed," he said.

These cells are known as stem cells and they have the potential to turn
into cells of any type of tissue: skin, heart, kidney or brain, for example.
What researchers are now doing in laboratories round the world is developing
techniques to turn these stem cells into specialised cells.
Thus
insulin-secreting cells could be created for diabetics and brain cells for
Parkinson's patients."

thought

Sometimes you have to let it be, to let it change.