Onlife

I just received the podcast of an interview I had with Nigel Warburton, you can listen to it by clicking on the title of this blog or visiting www.philosophybites.com "Luciano Floridi on The Fourth Revolution". It is also available from iTunes.

The death of a star may create a supernova explosion. A massive shock wave radiates throughout the whole star, which heats up and then explodes. This flash is as bright as a whole galaxy and leaves behind a rapidly spinning neutron star. The death of Michael Jackson caused a similar supernova effect on the web this week. Initially, when news of his sudden death spread, people at Google thought they were under a cyber attack. You can see why from the graph in this blog. Millions of people who searched for the star's name on Google News were greeted with an error page: "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application". Or the impact of a dead star.

CALL FOR PAPERS Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy 2009 will be held on October 1st-2nd, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. The conference will be hosted at the University of Tokyo's Sanjo Conference Hall. Keynotes speeches will be given by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University) and Professor Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech). This year AP-CAP 2009 will be held in conjunction with the Devices that Alter Perception workshop, which will form a special track. The conference invites papers from philosophy, computer science, robotics, and media arts. Practitioners of these and related fields like artificial intelligence, ethics, human-computer interaction, and society-technology studies will debate and demonstrate new research. The conference will foster a scholarly dialogue between designers and critics of computing systems. TIMELINE • July 15th, 2009: Deadline for abstract submission • August 15th, 2009: Abstract acceptance notification • September 1st, 2009: Early registratio...

A good book, with plenty of information, but... The writing is not as good as the contents: typos, cut&paste repetitions, redundant bits of information and some awkward sentences make the reader wish the text had been properly copy-edited by the publisher, especially given the fact that this is the second edition. And the philosophy is a bit too light: plenty of notes on a variety of topics, but the material could have been marshalled with a stronger hand. On the whole, worth reading together with Ferre's textbook .