Certain elements of the blogosphere are abuzz with news that Austin, TX’s Cycorp is about to release an AI, “Cyc,” on the Internet. With a mission to learn and build its knowledge, it will accelerate its new knowledge acquisition by interacting with netizens and siphoning multimedia information on the Web.
In a New Scientist article [...]

Here is a book to watch out for: The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil, to be released in September, 2005.
The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com’s description of the volume:
Product Details

Hardcover: 624 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005)
ISBN: 0670033847

Book Description
The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and controversial [...]

Shamelessly cut-and-pasted from Slashdot: eaglemoon writes “Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on [...]

Squeak is based on the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language developed by Xerox in the 1980s. Today, it is used as a “media authoring tool” to create virtual, educational toys in the classroom. Using a constructivist framework, “some students work with media created in Squeak by their teachers; others are creating their own simulations [...]