IBM helps Firefox reach disabled | Tech News on ZDNet

IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday.

Sounds like a useful addition to Firefox. Now if I could only get it to reduce the sensitivity to popping up the context menu when I press the left-mouse button too long on my iBook.

Currently reading Ronald Cole-Turner’s survey paper “Design and Destiny: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Human Germline Modification” prepared for “Science and Religion: Global Perspectives”, June 4-8, 2005, in Philadelphia and available here. It’s got some stuff in it on “preimplantation genetic diagnosis”, which starts with IVF but incorporates genetic testing of the embyro(s) prior to implantation, and a variety of responses (both secular and religious) to human germline modification.

Related to this is the article Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Impossible Choices . April 15, 2005 | PBS which looks at the nightmare of bioethical dilemmas faced by two everyday couples.

Saw that Oxford University has just set up the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute headed by transhumanist Nick Bostrom.

The Future of Humanity Institute was founded on 1 June 2005. FHI is part of the new James Martin School for the 21st Century at Oxford University. Dr. Nick Bostrom has been appointed as its director. Recruitment will take place over the coming months, with a view to starting activity in the fall of 2005. (This website is under construction.)The Institute aims to become humanity’s best effort at understanding and evaluating its own long-term prospects. FHI will study how anticipated technological developments may change human beings and transform the human condition.

A couple of interesting links off Wired News.

Firstly Wired News: Google’s Book Scanning Hits Snag comments on the problems Google is having convincing the existing publishing community its digital library attempt is a good thing. Really, what did they expect would happen?

And secondly Wired News: Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs talks about the version of Mac OSX that runs on the new Intel Mac is able to be hacked to run on non-Apple Intel hardware. Can’t see it happening soon but if Apple released a version of Tiger for generic Intel systems I’d buy and install it on our Acer P4 system in a flash.

Received several copies of the book “Portraits : Youth” today in the post. It’s a really excellent little book that is both a photo collage of young people in New Zealand together with a part of their own stories (including insights into their various ethnic communities).

It’s available from the Office of Ethnic Affairs for free!

I just emailed them (ethnic.affairs@dia.govt.nz) and they sent me three copies straight away. (There was an interview earlier this week with the director of the Office of Ethnic Affairs on the radio this week which described the project and included one of the young people in it.) Good resource for all sorts of people – might be the sort of thing that inspires other groups to put something similar together about the people in their school, local community or church.

News article (press release) about the book here: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0507/S00287.htm

(The boy on the left is of Russian descent, the two on the right are Assyrian and Somali respectively.)

Slow day today after I had a few old fillings drilled out and redone today. Tried to treat it as a practical exercise for the thesis. After all, in one of his articles about technology David Lyon asked the question, “Where is the boundary of the body—at the skin, or elsewhere?”

At the enamel possibly? Anyway, my teeth have been colonised by new technology and I took the rest of the day slowly. I guess fillings make me a cyborg in some of the definitions of the term.

FedEx’s lawyers get all tetchy over a guy who made his own furniture out of their (used) shipping materials and then posted the pictures of it on the net. Sounds like a creative form of recycling to me. More at :Wired News: Furniture Causes FedEx Fits.

Another recent article on introducing technologies, formerly associated with therapeutic, to assist the unimpaired in new ways. Another example of intentional cyborgism. See Wired News: Hearing Aids for the Unimpaired.

HearWear -­ The Future of Hearing, a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, shows off trendy deaf-tech prototypes like gadgets that can filter out annoying noises and memory glasses that replay the last few seconds of conversation — handy for wearers who might have missed someone’s name.

One of the significant issues facing people trying to make sense of data is getting the data in a format that can be analysed – particularly if you’re trying to use data from disparate sources. This following article notes an open source attempt to overcome this problem. See Wired News: Analyze This: Combining Data

In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together.

The programming codes that govern the framework, spearheaded by International Business Machines in conjunction with academic researchers and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will be open source and freely available.

Back when I was doing data mining related work this was a huge issue, so I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with.

STUFF : TECHNOLOGY – STORY : Apple buys NZ domain as download wars begin – Apple acquires www.itunes.co.nz

Guess we’ll have to wait and see though.