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Official TransVision 06 community
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| Short Transvision 2006 review |
[Aug. 20th, 2006|12:53 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  rejuvenated | ] |
Good
+ most of the presentations and discussions
+ virtual conference
+ relaxed atmosphere
+ seeing people who I knew only from the Internets
+ new ideas and views
+ cookies!
Bad
- technical difficulties
- guests who had to cancel
- 3-4 uninteresting presentations (IMHO)
- not enough ice water
Overall: **** 4 stars out of 5. With minimal resources we put together an excellent conference!
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TransVision06 in SL Report here.
More of my pictures (of the second and third day) here. |
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| No coherent vision |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|06:02 pm] |
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The panel on Body enhancement in 2020 was a disaster. The five speakers were almost as bad as professional futurologists, using every possibility to avoid making a specific prediction (yeah, I know it's hard to predict the future, but don't you think we should be able to do it to some extent, considering how well informed and smart we think we are)...
If you want to read my take on that, check out The Future of Genetic Engineering or the same post at the freely editable Future Wiki.
I also fully intend to find some brave enough transhumanist to collaborate on making a coherent and generally reasonable transhumanist timeline. Lack of information is not a sufficient excuse not to have a plan... |
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| (Sorta) end of the conference |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|05:10 pm] |
The conference isn't actually quite at an end, but the maintainer of the official TransVision blog must leave a bit early due to other committments. There's the announcement of Wells and Haldane awards and Nick Bostrom's closing address still left, after which the conference will end at 18:30 Finnish time. It's been fun to be here, hope you had fun following it as well. :)
Be seeing you! |
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| Cryonics reminder |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|10:58 am] |
Just to remind everyone who has old parents and worries about them (or who is already getting older himself) - check out the KrioRus information stand in the conference hall, ask Danila Medvedev or Igor Artyuhov at the conference about cryonics or visit the website http://www.kriorus.ru/english.html
General AI, cognitive enhancements and all other cool stuff is important, of course, but the most important thing is to be alive (or to be revived) to see it. :) |
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| So far so good |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|10:55 am] |
I just want to thank Ari Heljakka for composing a wonderful program. So far practically all presentations were good and structured very well too. I am looking forward for the rest of the Saturday.
P.S. Everyone who didn't see the fireworks championship on Friday really lost a lot. ;) |
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| Third day, and technical troubles |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|09:18 am] |
Just when we thought that technical problems were over, the TransVision website ceased functioning. Right now we can't do anything about it, so you'll just have to do without. Sorry! We also ask that once it does resume functioning, you don't download any of the videos directly from there.
In the meanwhile, the direct webcast should still be functioning, and you should still be able to access the archived streams from http://hy-stream.it.helsinki.fi/tktl/ , from the bottom of the page. |
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| Schedule changes |
[Aug. 18th, 2006|11:16 am] |
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The schedule has been slightly changed, with Nedervelde's presentation having been cancelled. Our Keynote speech was extended to compensate, and Dr. Danila Medvedev's presentation shifted to the afternoon. http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/program.php has the updated schedule. |
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| End of the first day of the conference |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|07:44 pm] |
The first day of TransVision 06 has now ended with James Hughes' excellent speech What is Transhumanism?. We had our share of technical problems, but by the end we managed to solve all of them. Hopefully we'll have the static video files of all the presentations online shortly. We talked, among other things, about Nick Bostrom's new method for evaluating coming ideas for human enhancements, de Grey's ideas for life extension and its ethics, and James Hughes' analysis of the enemies and friends of the whole transhumanism movement. Tomorrow we'll continue the discussion with talk about mind enhancement and about how to cross the abyss of doom that all of mankind is now facing. Among other things. We thank everybody who was with us today, and hope you'll still be here with us tomorrow. And bring your friends, too!
This is Helsinki, signing off for the night. |
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| Updating presentation files |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|04:13 pm] |
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For the convenience of those who aren't total slaves of Microsoft, there are now PDF versions of the first three Power Point slides up at http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/presentations/ . Also, de Grey's PP slides are up there for you to study in advance and thus follow the webcast easier when we get to that point. There should also be a PDF copy of de Grey's slides up shortly. |
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| Status update |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|03:45 pm] |
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There have been some technical difficulties due to our move from the initial conference venue to the primary one, for which we apologize. Also, the Second Life-IRC gateway is still not working. However, the webcast should now be online again (VLC player seems to work best for viewing it, in case QuickTime/Media Player doesn't work), and we have online the Power Point slides of three speakers who've already had their presentations - Nick Bostrom, Timo Airaksinen and Bruce Lloyd. You can find them at http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/presentations/ . |
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| Conference start |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|09:01 am] |
We're just about to begin the conference here at Helsinki. As of this moment, the connection between Second Life and IRC doesn't seem to be working, so anything said in one medium will, well, stay in one medium. This should get fixed soon, we hope.
We will begin with Nick Bostrom's speech An Evolutionary Heuristic for Identifying Promising Human Enhancements shortly. Tune in on your webcast to follow it. |
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| Webcast, take two. |
[Aug. 16th, 2006|09:07 pm] |
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Some people blamed us for making part of the webcasting instructions hard to understand. Also, there was some errata on them. So here are the updated instructions - you can also find them at http://www.transhumanismi.org/tv06/stream.php .
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The TransVision 2006 webcast can be viewed using a number of client
software, though some ways are more cumbersome than others. The most
straightforward way would be to install either QuickTime Player 6.5.2 or
Windows Media Player 10, if those are available on your platform.
Windows Media Player will require an extra codec package to be installed
from here.
QuickTime Player 7.x does not seem to work for some reason for video;
for just the audio, it will do as well. Second Life participants may
therefore want to install QT 6.5.2 for integration into the SL system.
A stand-alone QT 6.5 installer can be found here.
The stream will be available on the top of the page at
http://hy-stream.it.helsinki.fi/tktl/. Beside the stream name
("Transvision day X") there are three icons.
For QuickTime, choose the leftmost QT icon, for Media Player, choose the
rightmost icon. Your media should start streaming. Note that using a WWW
proxy might hinder your access to the stream; please disable any proxies
for the initiation of streaming. Note also that dialup modems will not
be fast enough to support the stream.
If you're happy using QuickTime Player 6.5 or Media Player, you can
stop reading now. However,
if your platform does not support or you do not wish to use one of these
players, you will still be able to view the stream, if a bit more awkwardly.
You will have to open up a player browser window regardless as instructed above
(in this case, it should not matter which player you choose, though we
suggest choosing the leftmost icon for RTSP and rightmost for MMS streams
just in case). This is
because the streaming server enforces access rights to the streams
according to who has visited the HTML page that embeds the stream.
Remember to disable WWW proxies in your browser for this. After you have
visited the page that would have embedded the player you can open the
stream in a separate player, such as the cross-platform VLC. Also at least some versions of mplayer are known to work. Technically, any player
supporting the H.263 and PCMU codecs and RTSP or MMS streams should work.
The RTSP URL will be rtsp://128.214.211.74/.sdp/tktl/tktl_1.sdp
The alternative MMS URL will be mms://128.214.211.74/tktl/tktl_1.asf.
Use whichever one your playback software seems happy with (RTSP seems
OK for VLC and mplayer). Remember that you will have to renew the
authorization on the streaming server (by clicking on one of the
player icons) at the start of each conference day. |
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