The Latest from the Blog

The Biological Future of Humanity

I’ve just arrived at the Future of Science conference here in Venice and The Evolution of Life session is underway. Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York will be speaking shortly. I hope to interview him and others later today. This is from today’s press release… “The human brain has enlarged three-fold over the last two million years, and that has surely had important survival value,” according to Ian Tattersall, “Human evolution is…

The Future of Science

Next week, I’ll be attending the Future of Science Conference in Venice, Italy (September 20-23). The conference theme is Evolution and we’ll be covering the Evolution of Life: Darwinism in the light of modern genetics session. The plan is to interview some of the speakers and panel participants. It’s an incredible line up; Peter Atkins, Ian Tattersall, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Daniel Dennett, Marc Hauser, Steven Pinker, among others. We’ll be posting interviews to the Tech Museum’s Understanding Genetics website later in the…

10,000 pounds and counting…

Since Ideum became “climate neutral” back in June, we’ve avoided 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. This is the equivalent of removing 517 cars from the road or planting 764 trees. As we mentioned at the time, the cost of zeroing out our carbon emissions was relatively inexpensive and the process was simple. We have a page that explains more about becoming carbon neutral.

Radical Trust

On the Assembly blog, Catherine Styles posted a paper she presented at the Austrailan Historical Association conference, How Web 2.0 will change history. It contains a brief introduction to Web 2.0 and some examples from mostly Australian websites. One concept (and term) in the paper that clearly stuck out was radical trust. There is one aspect of the Web 2.0 landscape that is really significant for publishers, whether they are cultural institutions like archives or libraries or museums, or historians like yourselves. Web…

Museums and the New Web: Online Forum

The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) will be hosting a 10-day online forum starting Wednesday, September 6th. I will be moderating the forum along with Kevin von Appen and Ken Dickson of the Ontario Science Centre (RedShiftNow), Bryan Kennedy of the Science Museum of Minnesota (Science Buzz), and Rick Bonney of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (Web Designs for Interactive Learning: WIDL). All of us contributed to the July/August issue of ASTC Dimensions magazine. The forum will focus on how science…

More ExhibitFiles

There are some new items of interest on the ExhibitFiles development blog since my last post in early July. You’ll find the results of our Design Workshop held in Berkeley in June, a front-end study by Randi Korn & Associates, and a great post by Kathy McLean about the project which includes her article, We Still Need Criticism. We’ve starting to get comments from the exhibit developer community, which is really helping the design process. The project itself is unusual in…

Remembering Nagasaki

Today is the 61st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The event was marked as it is each year, with a moment of silence at the city’s Peace Park near “ground zero.” Eleven years ago on the 50th anniversary, while I was at the Exploratorium, I was involved in producing a website, Nagasaki Journey (with Ali Sant, Susan Schwartzenberg and others) which included photographs taken the day after the bombing. A Japanese Army photographer Yosuke Yamahata captured the devastation…

“A model recycling Google Maps mashup”

The Google Maps mashup we developed for the City of Torrance, “Where to Recycle,” is featured today on Google Maps Mania. (The permanent link is here.) This blog is the “unofficial” authority on everything Google Maps. The review briefly explains how our mashup works and ends with a very positive statement, “In my view, this kind of mashup should be present in every city website!” We’d like to see that happen, too. As I mentioned before, the key motivation for developing the…

LA Times Calendarlive.com: Now on exhibit, the blogger’s view

An article by David Ng, Now on exhibit, the blogger’s view is in today’s Sunday Los Angeles Times. The article mentions our own MuseumBlogs.org site and starts by looking broadly at the museum blogging community: Within this small community, blogging can assume many guises. Some museums have dedicated staff who collectively write the blog entries and review visitor comments. Others entrust their blog to one person — an artist in residence or a curator — who uses the site as an official diary…

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