Monday is the last day to get your earlybird registration discount for this year's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, March 14-17 (Boing Boing readers can quote "et05bb" when you sign up on the web-site and get a five percent discount over the already-discounted earlybird rate). Back in December, I blogged some of my top picks for speakers and sessions this year:
- Raffi "Tivo Hacks" Krikorian and NYU's Tom Igoe doing a double-header tutorial on hardware hacking called Net Objects
- Damian Stolarz explaining how to Hack Sci-Fi Features Into Your Car
in a half-day session covering "the basic workings of the automotive
electric, audio, and diagnostic systems" and "radio head-ends, touch
screen input devices, remote controls, and in car x86-based hardware
and software all in the context of a working automobile" - My cow-orkers Wendy "Chilling Effect" Seltzer and Jason "Patent Busting" Schulz on Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them — a tour of all the cool crap you can buy today, which might be illegal tomorrow
- My pervy cow-orker Annalee "Techsploitation" Newitz's talk on How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change
which covers "how sex laws have enlarged the demand for technologies
that provide anonymous, instant, mobile gratification while also
stoking content-providers' desires for soft/hardware that can control
access and quickly identify users by age and geographical location." - The wildest researchers at BBC Radio: Tom "Plasticbag"
Coates, Matt "Brain Hacks" Webb, Matt "No Nickname" Biddulph and Paul
"Also No Nickname" Hammond talking on Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software in which they explain some deeply cool, deeply weird shit they're doing with the BBC's radio service - Matt "Metafilter" Haughey on Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild in which the Creative Commons's secret search sauce will be unveiled and dissected
- Tom "The British Don't Really Have Nicknames" Loosemore
explains TheyWorkForYou.com, the best political advocacy site I've ever
seen, in Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy - Natalie "Feral Robots" Jermijenko — my choice for real-world
cyberpunk heroine — takes us beyond her genius feral robot dogs with Social
Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking,
Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots:
"Feral robots are roving packs of adapted open source robots that are
released to investigate contaminated urban sites. Feral robots begin as
domestic commercially available robotic dog toys." - Danny "NTK" O'Brien and Merlin "5ives" Mann will jointly present their Life Hacks Live
work — a book-length version of Danny's amazing hacker life-skills
Life Hacks project, with "a whistle-stop tour through an amazing year
in this exploding field: tracking apps that merge the geek's
command-line power with GUI ease-of-use; the expansion of RSS and wiki
techniques into frontline organizing apps; the spread of search and
script automation onto the desktop; how plain text files are the new
rock and roll." - Finally, Lee "Jhai" Felsenstein, who pretty much invented the PC, will present on Tech That Helps the World, talking on the bicycle-charged ruggedized meshing WiFi networks he's sending to Laos. I mean, seriously: LAOS.
Can't wait for this — I'll see you there!
(Thanks, Rael!)
