Feb 1, 1994 12:00 PM

Electric Word

Electric Word

Richard Saul Wurman: TEDologist
When it comes to rubbing brain cells with the well-connected smart set, architect and Information Anxiety author Richard Saul Wurman's TED conference is the happeningest place to be. The theme: Technology, Entertainment, and Design - three things that may have sounded like a strange mix in '84, when Wurman hosted his first TED conference, but now go hand-in-hand. This year's gathering, TED5, opens in Monterey, California, February 24th and runs through the 27th, with seating for a very select 500.

Wurman: "There's no brochure. No poster. No press release." Still, those in the know know about it and passes sell out quickly.

Opening every year with the same line, "Welcome to the dinner party I always wanted to have but couldn't," Wurman thinks the social angle is what makes TED work so well: "You have confidence in the host that the people who are there are interesting." Attendees (a.k.a. "TEDologists") come from all walks of life: doctors, lawyers, artists, authors, scientists, publishers, and a colorful assortment of techies, from software wizards to Disney Imagineers. "There's no niche group," says Wurman. "You usually don't know what the person sitting next to you in the audience does." Then again, some you may recognize. To name-drop a few of TED5's coming attractions, there's director Oliver Stone, author and Harvard zoologist-geologist Stephen Jay Gould, and musician Quincy Jones. (Oh yeah, plus a batch of high-tech heavies like Bill Gates and John Sculley.)

The best part of TED, though, is what goes on between the sessions, during breaks. "Everybody is approachable," says Wurman. "The message to the audience is there isn't Them and Us; the audience is actually more important than the speakers." Make way for some heavy mingling. Introductions are made. Ideas swapped. Deals shaped. A real convergence, at US$1,450 a pop, excluding lodging and transportation. But look at the fabulous prizes you leave with: one year, Sharp gave away its top-of-the-line Wizard electronic organizer, preloaded with every attendee's contact information. "My goal," says Wurman, "is that the value of the stuff you take away is worth what you paid." (See Deductible Junkets, page 118, for conference details.) Wurman's e-mail address: wurman@media-lab.media.mit.edu.

- Joe Hutsko

Stinking Robots
Australian engineers have recently taken a cue from nature by giving robots the equivalent of pheromones. Researchers say that enabling robots to mark and detect their own trails using smell will make them cheaper, more efficient, and more flexible.

The idea here is that robots can mimic the behavior of honeybees, which use pheromones to mark flowers they've already visited. They can copy ants too. Ants use pheromones to mark the fastest path for carrying food back to the nest. To transport cargo from A to B, an intelligent robot with expensive sensing equipment would mark a trail that could then be followed by cheaper slave robots.

Most mobile industrial robots only get around because permanent markers in the floor show them the way, restricting them to specially modified environments. More intelligent machines recognize objects and places, but are expensive and difficult to program. Researchers at Griffith University in Brisbane, and Monash University in Clayton, have equipped a mobile robot to spit out, detect, and follow a trail of camphor - an inoffensive material that is easy to detect and vanishes within tens of hours, leaving only a harmless gas.

The camphor gives the robot two new abilities. It can find its way home and it can figure out what territory has already been covered.

Rodney Brooks of MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory, known for his work with "robot insects," says this indirect communication between robots is essential. When we start building micro-robots, he says, there won't be space on them for big communications systems. The only communication will be robots sensing others like themselves and markers in the world.

- Sunny Bains

Finally, a TV Guide for the Net......
For me, using the Net to get information is like wandering through a huge library with the lights out. I blindly grope across the shelves, grab a book that "feels" interesting, and then run outside into the light to see what I've nabbed. More often than not, I'm holding a copy of The 1936 Mineral Deposit Survey of Prichard, Alabama when what I really wanted was a Buzzcocks discography. Even after reading several Internet guide books, I acquired a mere penlight view of cyberspace, when what I really wanted was overhead lights.

Michael Wolff & Company, an independent book publisher/packager in New York City, was also working in the dark while using the Net to gather data for Where We Stand, a book ranking the international community by population, resources, GNPs, etc. "We started using CompuServe, but it became too expensive, so we started using the Internet," says Wolff. As he and his partners struggled along, Wolff wondered "if there was a way to approach the Net that was organized and familiar. Since I'm not a hacker by any means, what did I relate to?" Not only did all the existing Net books ignore cyberspace's entertaining aspects, but they were process-oriented, not content-oriented. Why hadn't somebody made a TV Guide for the Net? Wolff recognized an opportunity for a new book, and his group wrote Net Guide.

Wolff's five-person company posted requests for ideas for Net Guide, and the online community responded with 100 e-mail messages a day about various jumping-off points for every imaginable interest. "Part of the pleasure of a new discovery is sharing it," says Wolff.

Perhaps the most difficult part was deciding what to cut for the 384 pages of listings. Net Guide is divided into main categories such as arts and entertainment, business and finance, home, and lifestyles, which are further subdivided into more specific topics, so that Dr. Who fans, collectors of old 45s and 78s, female economists, and Boston Bruins fanatics will know where to look on CompuServe, Genie, AOL, the Internet, and hundreds of BBSes. The first 30 pages of Net Guide contain how-to instructions, so even net newbies can jump in.

At the time Net Guide went to press, all the resources listed were active, but since Net sites as a group don't exactly have the half-life of plutonium, Wolff & Company will be offering an online version of Net Guide (tentatively priced at US$15 a month), with the newest hangouts in the Net. Net Guide: US$19. Published by Random House. Michael Wolff & Company (800) 638 1133, +1 (212) 841 1572, e-mail info@go-netguide.com.

- Mark Frauenfelder

Satellite Fish Cops
Busting high-seas fish poachers is nearly impossible. The National Marine Fisheries Service has only one patrol vessel and one airplane to scour more than 1 million square miles of ocean. Scoffing at this feeble resistance, poachers often creep into off-limits waters and haul up tons of forbidden salmon and carelessly kill untold numbers of rare marine mammals. Although driftnet ships must carry transponders to enable satellites to monitor their positions, many pirate poachers refuse.

In hopes of detecting such activity, scientists at Natural Resources Consultants, a Seattle firm that advises governments and fishermen, have launched a joint venture with satellite imaging experts at Western Resource Analysis. They hope to develop a system to track vessel movements by tracing and analyzing exhaust plumes from their engines, possibly to determine whether boats are towing nets or just traveling through. "That's the essence of why we believe this system is useful," says NRC's Mark Freeberg. "It doesn't just work with the good guys."

Scientists reckon the oceans can sustain harvests of about 100 million metric tons of seafood annually. But recently revised estimates suggest that total catches may already exceed that mark, perhaps by as much as 50 percent, when the inadvertent "bycatch" of nontarget species is included. Satellite surveillance may be the only affordable way to keep the poachers in line.

- Brad Warren

Peter Chung's Aeon Flux
There are dozens of animated shorts within MTV's Liquid Television, and several of them are polar opposites of Beavis and Butt-head: visually fluid and full of surrealistic imagery. Foremost among these is the story of a svelte, psychosexual, sci-fi assassin - Aeon Flux. Aeon (rhymes with peon) Flux is the creation of Peter Chung, 32-year-old director of animation for Colossal Pictures, the film company that produces Liquid Television. What drove the Seoul-born Chung to cast a half-naked covergirl as his action here? "I'm interested in exploiting the entire human body for expressive purposes, instead of what you usually see in cartoons: just the hands and facial expressions. When I first designed Aeon Flux, I wondered whether I should make her less sexy looking - give here a costume that was less revealing. But it seems silly to be working in the animation medium and not be a little unrealistic. The fact that she's scantily clad helps t emphasized the expressive qualities of the human body. I would have drawn her nude if I could get away with it."

Physicality is a large part of Aeon Flux. She is not dissimilar in appearance or in moral fiber to the star of Luc Besson's film La Femme Nikita: Because she's a visual knockout, you are duped into believing her actions have justifications and are not simply brutal killings. There are no cleverly placed actors to distinguish good from evil. The heroes do not resonate with righteousness, the villains do no wheeze with contemptuousness. There is simply an angular science fiction setting in which a lot of blood is spilled.

Another quirk that makes this violently brilliant animation stand out is the fact that Aeon Flux dies in several episodes. This plot development cam rather unexpectedly: "After the first season," explains Chung, "I killed her off, not knowing that there was ever going to be a second season. When I was asked to work on a second season, instead of explaining that she really didn't die, or that she was a robot, I decided that dying was going to be her thing."

Aeon Flux won't be in the next (third) season of Liquid Television but it is being pitched as a half-hour show for MTV.

- Dan Sicko

Gobs and Glory
Mortal Kombatants everywhere are frantically working their little thumbs sore trying to crack the rumored "secret code" that unlocks the SNES version of the game's blood and guts animation sequences. We say: Screw the bloody matter. We'd rather kick some fungible butt, with Interplay's new Clay Fighter for the SNES. That's right, modeling clay, of the "Oh Nooo Mr. Bill" variety.

"Everybody is serious with Mortal and Street Fighter," says Greg Thomas, president of Marin, California-based Visual Concepts, the video game producer responsible for Clay Fighter. "We wanted to add something new to the genre and make it funny." His medium: clay. To come up with the gooey claymation characters, Thomas took his idea to stop-motion animation gurus Ken Pontac and David Bleiman, of Danger Productions in Brisbane, California (which is currently developing a new, stop-motion animated Saturday morning kid's show, Bump in the Night, that will air on ABC television next fall).

The painstaking, shape-and-shoot process of creating and animating the claysters took nearly a year. Interplay Productions joined in on the fun by splicing together certain animated sequences to create new moves, and by creating a voice-enhanced musical score and splat-happy sound effects. At Visual Concepts, programmer Jason Anderson put in a year's worth of 18-hour days to turn the raw clay animations into a smooth-flowing, ass-kicking-fun fighting game, which cheerfully boasts flying chunks of colorful clay instead of virtual viscera.

For sure, Clay Fighter is gobs and gobs of good clean fun. Parents will approve, and may even slap a few clay heads themselves. Interplay Productions: (800) 969 4263, +1 (714) 553 6678.

- Joe Hutsko

The Ecology of Economics
At 41, Michael Rothschild is a jack-of-all-trades wunderkind. Though he earned his law and MBA degrees simultaneously from Harvard, Rothschild's claim to fame is his work in another field - economics.

Working as a business consultant, Rothschild was struck by the contrast between economic theory and economic practice. In business he saw a chaotic, self-organizing information system that was more biological than mechanical. He found that business organizations, like living organizations, adapt, grow, die - and learn.

0rganizational learning then, according to Rothschild, is the economic equivalent of evolution. It is also the linchpin of his "bionomics."

The most important difference between organizational learning and biological evolution is pace. Economic progress has always been millions of times faster than biological progress. And according to Rothschild, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Organizational learning depends on a uniquely human skill: the ability to use what Rothschild calls "coded information." This is his shorthand for symbolic representations of information such as written language, blueprints, maps, etc.

As the information economy accelerates exponentially, the validity of Rothschild's bionomics will become evident. Because of ceaseless economic evolution, in the form of accumulated production experience, the cost of goods falls. Forever. Historically, this facet of free market economies has been masked by inflation. Now, even runaway inflation will be hard pressed to keep up with the falling prices that will result from the Digital Information Explosion.

Don Lavoie, associate professor of economics and chair of the Program on Social and Organizational Learning at George Mason University, says, "Michael Rothschild's contribution is rethinking economics as an information ecosystem - an evolving system for the discovery and conveyance of knowledge. Others, most notably Friedrich Hayek, have used biological evolution as a model and stressed the biological aspects of market processes. Rothschild goes beyond this, by drawing from a diverse range of detailed biological examples."

The Bionomics Institute, created by Rothschild in 1991, offers conferences, seminars, consultations, and publications. The Bionomics Institute: +1 (415) 454 1000, +1 (415) 454 7460, e-mail bionomix@well.sf.ca.us.

Parallel Chronology of Information

Biological Event Technological Event (millions of yrs ago) (years ago)

- Sandy Sandfort

Nicholson Baker: from Vox to The Fermata
Nicholson Baker is a perfectly normal, shy man who writes books about perfectly normal, shy men who have universes exploding in their minds. He lives in a nice quiet suburb. He has a tiny new baby. And his new book, The Fermata, is shocking.

Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, was a phenomenal recording of the wanderings of the idle mind, a book that did for antiperspirant, olive loaf, and perforation what The Brothers Karamazov did for faith, despair, and murder.

Baker's last novel, Vox, caused a stir in the publishing world with its simple yet devastating structure: The entire book consists of the conversation between a man and a woman engaged in pay-per-minute phone sex.

Baker's new novel, The Fermata, concerns Arno Strine, who can stop time at will. As he wanders about in the frozen universe, he does what he thinks any guy, given his powers, would do. He checks out what's under the dress of that little number with the cute haircut.

"The easy thing to do would be to make this a nice story, in which the guy does all sorts of gently philanthropic things," Baker says. "But if you really think about it, if you had this ability, would you right all the wrongs of the world, or would you engage in some subversive experimentation first?"

Arno chooses the latter. Baker takes Arno, and us, to ridiculous extremes in search of the perfect Strinean sexual experience. He hides in women's hampers and watches them masturbate. He freezes women in time and snoops into their lives, looking for clues in their diaries or their underwear drawers that he can later use to make himself irresistable to them.

What truly motivated Baker to write The Fermata? Indulging his and most every writer's most unattainable fantasy: observing, participating in, and recording events in the real world as they happen. "Writing always feels a little like you are suspending the universe and creating a separate sphere of reflection," Baker says. "But Arno is able to take it a little further. He can be right in the middle of doing something voyeuristic, say, and be quietly thinking it over at the same time. He can be there and not there. In fact, while I was writing the book, the premise took hold of me, and I really started to expect that there would be a time when time-perversion would be possible."

If that sounds a lot like the vague, bodiless worlds of VR and the Net, Baker, onetime technical writer, acknowledges the debt. "The book is trying to do something similar to VR, as all novels are, but more embedded in the real world," he says. "I want imperfection, not complete control."

The Fermata is so weird, so extremely dirty, so funny, on such knowing terms with pornography, and above all, so well written, that no one will be able to ignore it. US$21. Random House: (800) 733 3000, +1 (212) 751 2600

- Robert Rossney

Truth or Legend?
Does the toilet flush the other way around in the other hemisphere?

Does hot water freeze faster than cold? Does the toilet flush the other way around in the other hemisphere? Did Mikey from the Life cereal commercials die from eating the candy Pop Rocks? Alt.folklore.urban (AFU) is the place to find out.

Down in the trenches of Usenet, the keeper of the fine line between fact and fiction is Terry Chan, maintainer of AFU's FAQ (list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions). Chan, at left, a 31-year-old economist from Berkeley, California, took charge of the FAQ in 1991. Since then he has spent an hour per day reading messages (on average, more than 130 per day) and deciding when there's enough information to declare a matter settled. The FAQ document evolves over time as newsgroup members contribute new research. It is currently 23 pages long.

Readers of AFU go to the library, search through databases, conduct experiments, and write letters to determine the truth of popular stories. Is there really a secret club that serves alcohol in Disneyland's New Orleans Square? Peter van der Linden, author of the original version of the AFU FAQ, recalls that one AFU reader actually "placed an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper asking members to contact him. He then persuaded one to let him dine on his (Disneyland) account!"

"We're not folklore professionals - we're hacks," says Chan. "We don't have any pretensions to really knowing a lot about folklore. But I think it's good to understand urban legends and have a skeptical attitude about things you hear." As information sources become more decentralized, it becomes harder to separate truth from legend - especially with computer networks to propagate rumors. "A lot of the knowledge we have about the outside world is actually quite frail," says Chan.

Here are a few answers from alt.folklore.urban's FAQ. True: Hot water evaporates while freezing, producing 75 percent of the ice in 90 percent of the time. False: Toilet water does not flush the other way round in the other hemisphere, due to Coriolis, though the Coriolis force does affect fluids if you take incredible pains to isolate it. False: Mikey (Life cereal) did not explode from eating Pop Rocks with soda (you wish!).

- Amy Bruckman

The Sexonix Bust
Sexonix, the world's first VR sex company, has lots of appeal. They manufacture and sell specialized software and hardware to bring about the ultimate in safe sex and digital convergence. Just one thing keeps it out of the hands and off the genitals of eager teledildonauts: The company is a hoax from start to finish, masterminded by Joey Skaggs, a professional media performance artist.

Sexonix got its "start" at the Toronto Christmas Gift Show in the fall of 1992, when Skaggs rented a booth at the show and called a press conference to demonstrate his wares to reporters. But Skaggs's booth was empty - he claimed all of his VR gear was confiscated by Canadian customs for obscenity reasons, putting Sexonix out of business.

The confiscation story was covered on television, radio, and newspapers in Toronto, and picked up by wire services around the world. Future Sex and New Media magazines covered Sexonix's plight, expressing outrage and cries of foul play.

All well and good, except the gear never existed, and he never had anything to show. The whole stunt was done with a few well-chosen video clips from Lawnmower Man, some actors, and help from a public relations agency to stir up press interest.

Skaggs wasn't satisfied with just duping the media: He went after the online community as well. In July 1993, months after the initial wave of publicity surrounding Sexonix, he posted a press release describing the "events" surrounding his Toronto confiscation and the demise of Sexonix on several BBSes, including ECHO, Fidonet, and the Well. His posting stimulated discussions that were active over the summer, and he still gets queries once in a while. Most Wellites fell for the scam - except for journalist Brock Meeks, who smelled a rat and checked the facts.

Once exposed on the Well, Skaggs was vilified by online denizens, and one counter-prankster posted that Skaggs had died of mysterious circumstances. Needless to say, Skaggs is alive and well and quite amused by the attention.

This isn't Skaggs's first hoax. Previously he played a doctor with a cockroach-extract-based cure for arthritis, acne, and radiation sickness; a proprietor of a dog bordello; and the founder of the Fat Squad - guards for fat people to keep them from overeating.

Seeing how easily the Sexonix hoax went over on the Net, where everybody is both a reporter and a reader, Skaggs's media pranks are a reminder to check the source before reposting the story.

- David Strom

WIREDTOP 1O
Ten most populated chat rooms created by members of AOL:

women4women
Intelligent Intimacy
men4men
Swingers or Group
Le Chateau
Men Who Want 2 Meet Men
Naughty Wives
Young Men4Men
Forty Something
Need Female for Adult Films

Captured at 11:00 p.m., Friday, December 4, 1993. Similarly named rooms, filled to capacity, were witnessed on other nights.

Family Values: From Cowpokes to Cartridges
Circa 1930: 1993: Gene Autry's Ten Cowboy Nintendo Video Game Content Commandments (From Nintendo's Parents' (used as guidelines for Informational Brochure) the making of his movies) —————————————————————–

He must not take unfair No random, gratuitous, and/or advantage of an enemy excessive violence

He must be a patriot No subliminal or overt political messages

He must be gentle with No domestic violence and/or abuse children, elders, and animals

He must not possess racially No ethnic, racial, religious, or religiously intolerant nationalistic, or sexual ideas stereotypes of language

He must neither drink nor No use of illegal drugs, smoking smoke materials, alcohol

He must help people in No graphic illustration of death distress

He must respect women, No sexually suggestive or explicit parents, and his nation's content laws

He must be a good worker No excessive force in sports games

He must always tell the No profanity or obscenity truth

He must never go back on his No sexist language or depictions word

Broadcast Quality From the Desktop
"Broadcast quality!" That's the claim, but most desktop digital video systems output 30 frames per second - but not the 60 fields per second that broadcast-quality video requires. Producers who use the Mac for video post-production must rent time on D1 edit bays to make material ready for prime time.

Now Radius of San Jose, California is offering a solution: the VideoVision Studio, which allows Adobe Premiere to output full-screen, 60-fields-per-second broadcast quality video.

At 1993's Digital World, broadcast designers Flavio Kampah and David Sparrgrove saw a demonstration of Radius's at-that-time-unreleased Video-Vision. Kampah, who had already become a convert when he used a desktop system as an editing tool on a music video for U2, wanted to create their next project - the introduction to the lowbrow TV show American Gladiators - entirely on the Mac. The designers convinced the Radius honchos to let them be the board's first users. And the result was a first in broadcast design history: The colorful bursts of fast moving images and textured graphics from the American Gladiators opening came straight off the desktop.

Sparrgrove raves about the new board: "We didn't need to surrender control. We could continue to design while we produced." Radius: +1 (408) 434 1010.

- Debra Kaufman