From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Will Wright, the video-game designer responsible for some of the best-selling titles of all time, says that video games are better at inspiring students to learn than actually teaching them.

Two interesting pieces of news emerged on virtual worlds: At the Virtual Worlds Conference, IBM and Linden Labs announced plans to develop a set of open standards that would allow avatars to traverse from one virtual environment to another. Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements [...]

Presented at the JTET conference this morning: Arthur M. Harkins, Ph.D. (USA) John Moravec, Ph.D. (USA) University of Minnesota Abstract This presentation is concerned with complex subjects, but presents them in ways that audiences can understand and professionally contemplate. The core concept of the paper is “sustainable innovation,” which presumes the necessity for continuous innovation [...]

ZDNet is running a blog story on the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. Particular attention in the article is focused on the debate between Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstader on utopian versus dystopian futures: Kurzweil acknowledged that Singularity could lead to an unappealing or cataclysmic future, but he believes his vision will have a soft [...]

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 [...]